A Curious Instrument

In 1999, I had just left my off-shore job and I was able to find work at a prison about 60 miles from our home as a computer technician. I only worked there for a few months, but I met some inmates that were Mormons like I am. One of them hooked me up with the prison chaplain and asked that I start a "sunday school" class for the Latter-Day Saint inmates. I decided to do it and a friend of mine, who had spare time and income on his hands, got involved with it as well.  Many Saturdays, we would make the drive to the prison in my friend truck, spend some time with a handful of inmates, and drive back, which took up the bulk of the day. It was a marvelous experience and I can say that some of my most enduring spiritual experiences happened in a tiny, cinder-block room in the bowels of the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility (GCCF) ! Sadly, as the years passed, I guess my friend got burned out and dispirited as our favorite prison chaplain died of cancer and the cost of t...

Lest you think me cocky with the title, it was not not me that proclaimed myself a Master.  After nearly eighteen months of effort and lack of sleep, Western Governors University has proclaimed me a Master of Science.  I am told I have mastered Information Technology and have a specialization in Network Management, so who am I to argue with that? Now that this is done, I will likely take a bit of a break and then get back to my more philosophical writing, if I can muster such.

After a wrestling match with AT&T U-verse , the long stretch of server-less-ness has finally come to an end. If you thought http://qix.me, http://quix.us, gopher://qix.me , http://shetlandic.info, and all the rest had disappeared into the fading purple of the World-Wide-Web sunset , you were wrong. It lives on!

We have a house under contract in Oklahoma City and the plan is to close on it and move in by the end of February. Not too long thereafter in March 2014, I hope to have the server back on-line (likely with far better bandwidth than previously) and resume regular operations.

If you have noticed that http://qix.me and gopher://qix.me have been off-line, that is because my family has relocated to Oklahoma and our situation is too fluid for now to allow for a decent internet connection for the home server.  I have no idea when this will be remedied.

A few years back, President Henry B. Eyring  gave a talk about a scripture study method he had used in the past. It was basically to read one verse (or two) a day and ponder it.  He said that he gained so many new insights from taking his study very, very  slowly. I decided that day that I would try that out. It has been years now and I decided to pick up where I had been reading in the Book of Mormon with chapters at a time (and inconsistently).  I can't say when I started (perhaps three or four years ago), but I began at 2nd Nephi chapter 10 and I am just now at approaching Alma chapter 27.  As you can see, it is slow going! As predicted, there have been many insights and there is one today.   I don't know if I will blog about this every day, but perhaps this will contribute to more regular posts.   It is from Alma 26:29 (a rather long verse) which talks about two subjects: How to spread the gospel and what reception you can expect to receive. ...

I am happy to note that Lisa and I have been married for 25 years this coming Tuesday!  We will be off somewhere and sleeping in and having the sort of fun we tend to have, which is probably terribly low-key compared to most... I also calculated something else and it has been fifteen years since "The Great Writing Year", where I penned many of my short stories, the awesome novella Rachel and Her Knight in Shining Armor , and wrote the first complete draft of a book from The Navigiary Series .  That was 1998, while I was bobbing about on the waters off the US Gulf Coast and the west coast of Africa as a seismic navigator. To celebrate the 15th anniversary of my big writing push, I am giving everyone  A Free Copy of "The Joys of Autism and Christian Ethos" , which is a collection of many of these stories that is available from my Amazon store .  The book will only be free for a few days, so don't hesitate to get it right now! Of course, I welcome your kind rev...