The plan last night was to bake four of the pie crusts I bought (I'm to lazy to make my own crusts like I've done in years past), mix up some pumpkin pie filling (using the Libby's recipe, cutting the sugar a tad, and adding a bit more spice) and bake ...

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What a pleasant surprise to visit Orson Scott Card's web site this week and discover four new articles to read, two of which are truly excellent and relevant to Thanksgiving and gratitude, "A Thank-You Letter in This Time of War" and "How I'll Celebrate Thanksgiving".

Thank you, Horsey. I appreciate your...

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Welcome, Scott, back to St. George!

Around 8:30 AM or so, my friend and former roommate who since had moved to Joplin, Missouri, called from the Greyhound bus stop here in St. George. He had arrived at last!

It was good to see him again. As we drove back to my house he talked about...

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Last night, after staying up far later than I should (I think I fell asleep around 1:00 AM), shortly before 3:00 AM my cell phone pager woke me. A server at work had rebooted for some reason, and our monitoring system paged me. The machine came back up and seemed okay. I figured diagnosis could wait until another time.

But I didn't get back to sleep. I'd forgotten to read my daily chapter from The Book of Mormon (I was supposed to read chapter 16 of Alma, an exciting one where the wicked folks of Ammonihah are destroyed). But I was too distracted, and instead turned to browsing 'blog entries I came across of other members of the LDS faith. Wow! I didn't realize there were so many LDS bloggers around!

By the time I was feeling tired again, I looked up from my computer and...

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The Incredibles Movie Poster This past weekend, I went to The Incredibles with my sister, Janna. Wow! At times I forgot completely that I was watching an animated movie, the action was so well done and the story so perfect. I liken it to my experience watching Spiderman 2, which I also loved. Pixar's done it again! This movie is intense, clean, exiting, the art and design beautiful (I loved the ending credits -- at least until the projector shut down early before they'd completed!), the story well-written, the characters believable and likable, even lovable. This is a must see movie!

Jack-o-Man the Snow-o-Lantern Saturday afternoon, before hordes of trick-or-treaters came through the neighborhood where my parents reside in Hurricane, my father and I, on a whim, hopped into his truck and drove up the road heading toward Kolob. It was a brisk, cool, clear day.

...By the time we were finished, it was dark, so we lit a candle and Jack-O was alive!

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Lightning in St. George, UtahLast night (or rather, very early this morning, Wednesday morning) a thunderstorm rolled through St. George. The booming thunder woke me up. I grabbed my digital camera and tried to figure out how to set the shutter speed to a super-slow setting so I could try to capture some of the lightning displays going on above. I was clueless, and had to quickly download the camera's instruction manual before I knew how to do it.

So there I was at 3:00 AM, sitting on my porch with my camera, sitting directly on the concrete, using the sole plastic chair there as a make-shift tripod to stabilize the camera for some 10-15 second exposures. I pointed, clicked, pointed, clicked, on and on, capturing a large number of totally black pictures. Once or twice I got lucky.

My very first lightning pictures! No, the image included in this post is nothing astounding, but it's one of my very first.

Ecstatic, I came back inside while the storm continued westward towards Hurricane where my parents reside (where, they tell me, it wakened them as well).

Lighning is as beautiful as it is dangerous. I can understand Benjamin Franklin's fascination.

No, this isn't about an insecticide spray, but about a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. This web site is hosted on a FreeBSD server that has four 120 gigabyte hard drives in it. The data is stored in a RAID 5 array, which means that if...

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I'm passionate about music, good music. Probably it's because music so easily affects me, and can quickly and deeply move the very core of my being. Last September I mentioned a song from BYU Singers' Songs of the Soul album and how powerful it was.

This weekend, I let iTunes randomly play tracks from my collection (many of my CDs are archived on my computer's hard drive so I can listen to hours and hours of music while I work) and one of my favorite numbers from the aforementioned CD played, Water Night...

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Since this past weekend, I've tinkered a bit using one of Google's Gmail e-mail accounts to see what all the hype was about. They've got some good ideas, but it's nothing revolutionary. Their mail filters for auto-labeling have a looooong way to go before they're truly useful. I'll stick with Thunderbird for now as my main mail client, which at least has some useful filters for auto-cagegorizing my mail (and I get a TON) as well as having a pretty-good SPAM filter (for the stuff that makes it past my first tier of defence, InfoWest's Postini filtering).

Hopefully my several "feedback" messages to Google won't fall on deaf ears and they'll make Gmail actually useful. If they do, I'll switch all my mailing list mail to Gmail and continue using my existing e-mail addresses as I do now for real stuff.