Original Blog: 2.18.2002 to 5.11.2002
Saturday, 5-11-02
This morning I decided to go off sweets. The past few days I've been
rather lax as far as that goes (ice cream, candy bars, etc.), and it
certainly makes a difference. Blech. Whenever I have sweets, the next
morning I feel yucky, and it's not fun. Back when I used to stay off
sweets (I'm still amazed I pulled it off for ten whole months), I felt
much better. So this is it. No more candy, ice cream, cake, doughnuts,
and anything else sweets-like. (I would say "off sugar," but sugar's
in everything -- apples, jam, pretty much anything you buy from
the store, etc.)
Rachmaninoff's
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is quite beautiful.
I found an MP3 of it somewhere on
mp3.com
a couple of years ago. According to the ID3 tag it's by the SRachmaninoff
artist. I have no idea if they're still around, though.
I've been trying to find the 1992 edition of William Kuo's Teaching
Grammar of Thai, with no luck. I wrote Berkeley (the publisher) and
they said it's been out of print for several years and they haven't a clue
where copies might be found. Well, I suppose I must resign myself to using
the 1982 edition the BYU library has, unless I can miraculously find a copy
at some used bookstore somewhere in this country... I ordered Mary Haas's
Thai dictionary (1964 edition, which seems to be the best) a few days ago.
My Thai dictionary just arrived. It's pretty cool -- it used to be a
Berkeley library copy. :) I'll find much more use out of it once I know
some Thai, though. :)
Rats, I'm starting to feel sick. It's probably that big bowl of ice cream
I had on Thursday. Darn. Being sick isn't any fun. That's another reason
to go off sweets. :) I'm not feeling really sick -- just a little
woozy, slight cough, stuff like that. But it could escalate. I'll go to
bed early tonight. I hope it's gone by tomorrow...
Amazingly I've still been able to keep my head on straight, so apparently
I'm not that sick (yet). I don't really feel like doing anything,
though. Anyway, I learned six more Thai consonants and four more vowels.
And reviewed the stuff I learned yesterday. It's coming along quite well.
I can read the letters with almost perfect accuracy, and I remember how to
write them most of the time. I'm starting to find myself in the midst of
the low/middle/high class rankings and how they affect syllable tone and
all that fun stuff. Right now it seems like an awful lot to remember, but
I'm sure I'll get more familiar with it and before long it'll be second
nature. In fact, I've already picked up which sounds a syllable can end
with (k, p, t, m, n, ng, w, y, and any of the vowels). And I didn't even
try to learn it. That's good. The language is going quite well so far,
better than I hoped.
Turns out someone (Zachary Landau) was already working on a Linux
Distributed Proofreaders client. He hasn't touched the project since
March, though, so he's letting me try my hand at it. It'll be a good
summer project.
Friday, 5-10-02
I started studying Thai today. It's not as hard as I thought, thank
heavens. :) I focused my efforts on learning the script, since that seems
to be the best thing to start with. It was surprisingly easy -- with very
little effort I learned 30 or so letters and the numbers from one to ten.
And even a handful of words.
Thai tidbits: the Thai drive on the left side of the road, and there are
lots of malaria-infested mosquitoes. I probably shouldn't tell my mom
about the latter. :) One of the hardest things for me, I think, will be
getting used to all the bugs. In my mind it's easy enough, but this
morning I discovered a spider next to my trash can, and when I started
pulling the can away so I could get at it, it started crawling up the can
and I quite audibly hollered. It's kind of embarrassing -- I'm a
guy, for crying out loud, and guys shouldn't be scared of little
bugs hundreds of times smaller than themselves -- and so I hope it won't be
a big problem in Thailand. In my mind I can romanticize it -- it's an
adventure -- but will I be able to do it in real life, when
cockroaches are climbing up my arm in the middle of the night? Only time
will tell, I guess. Bugs are the only things that bother me like that, I
think. I hope. :)
Thursday, 5-9-02
Installed Red Hat 7.3 on that scratch computer I put together the other
day. (It's a P266 with 128 megs RAM and an 8 gig hard drive.) I'm running
fluxbox on it since Gnome is too slow (and I don't even dare to try KDE 3
on it :)). The machine is mostly just a backup. I set it up as a DHCP
server, since that's how I wanted to network it to my laptop. dhcpd isn't
that hard to set up.
Last night Byron showed me how to fix the sync problem with MPlayer. All
you do is use the - and + keys (next to backspace). Quite easy. MPlayer
is exceedingly cool. The developers have attitudes, but I don't really
care -- if they can produce software like MPlayer, let them have all the
attitude they want. :)
I've been cutting firewood for my family these past few days. It's good to
get some fresh air and physical exercise.
We signed up for AT&T Broadband today. They can't come install it till May
18th, though. That still gives me three months of high-speed access before
I leave on my mission. :)
Wednesday, 5-8-02
We're going to switch from our ISP (Computer Solutions) to AT&T's broadband
service. It's reportedly faster than DSL (1.5Mbps download and 256kbps
upload, I think) and ends up being somewhat cheaper. I don't know how
long it'll take to install, though. I'm probably going to put together
an old Linux box (a 486 most likely) to serve as a router. It'll be nice
to have high-speed access for the last few months before I leave.
You know, it feels rather good to think that I'll be leaving the world
behind for two years. I won't have to worry about my laptop dying on me,
I won't have to worry about school, I won't have to worry about any of
those kinds of things. I'll just have to focus on serving the Lord and
His children. It will be hard, of course -- very hard -- but it
still feels wonderful to "sell all that I have and follow Him" (so to
speak, that is -- I probably won't be selling very much, unless I feel I
ought to). A mission is definitely what the Lord wants me to be doing for
these two years.
I don't think I'll try to get a job this summer. Instead I'll spend my
time helping my family. We're trying to get a handful of products off the
ground (music note flashcards, a sheet music organizer cabinet, and a
poetry copybook) and it's more important for me to help out with those.
(We is my family, by the way, primarily my parents and I.)
I want to learn to play the violin. I don't leave till the end of August,
and surely I can make a fair amount of progress by then. Even if I don't,
it'll be good to discipline myself. And I've always loved the violin.
It's my favorite instrument. I wonder how far I can get in three and a
half months... (Yes, I do realize that learning an instrument takes a
serious investment in time. Heck, I wake up at 4:30 -- I can shower, pray,
read my scriptures for half an hour, practice violin for an hour (luckily
I sleep in the basement, so I shouldn't wake anyone up), then study Thai
for an hour.) Speaking of Thai, I still haven't started a formal study
yet. I need to start soon, though. Anyway, I'm quite taken with
this idea of learning the violin. I'll have to teach myself, since all my
money is being funneled into my mission and I can't afford to spend any
more. That shouldn't be a problem, though. It'll be a good case study of
how successful one can be in teaching oneself an instrument (versus taking
lessons, that is). When I get back from my mission I want to join one of
the orchestras. Music has been superceded by school for the past few
years, sadly, and I miss it. I haven't done regular piano practice in two
or three years.
Hmm, I haven't done much work on the site for a while, other than this
journal. 'Tis a pity. It's hard to decide what deserves my time when
there are so many things begging for my attention.
Tuesday, 5-7-02
I haven't worked on The Ball and the Cross for a week or so, but
today I typed in the requisite seven pages (up from six to compensate for
the lost time). I'm in the middle of the ninth chapter now. 145 pages
left (out of 254).
Speaking of things pushed to the back burner, someday I'll revise that
essay on materialism and post it here. Everything has been put on hold
since my mission call arrived, and I still feel like I ought to be spending
the majority of my time studying Thai and learning the customs of Thailand
(like not touching anyone's head). I'm going to get a Thai Book of Mormon
soon; that should help with the language. Right now I look at a page of
Thai and think, "Will I really be able to understand that in a
few months?" It seems impossible at the moment. :) Luckily I have
experience behind me to prove to my subconscious that new languages are
indeed conquerable. Once I get the pronunciation and script down, I'll be
home free. That seems to be the main hurdle for me when learning a
language -- once I master the pronunciation, the rest is a piece of cake.
(Side note: that's an interesting idiom, "a piece of cake." Someday I
must look into the history of it. Another one that strikes me as somewhat
funny is "doesn't hold a candle to it." And while I'm on the subject of
language, I wonder why exactly the British put their periods outside the
quotation marks while we Americans put ours inside. Is there a real
reason for it? Hmm, interesting...)
Last night I watched Anna and the King (the one with Jodie
Foster), since it's one of the few movies on Thailand that I could find.
(Though I hear it was actually filmed in Malaysia. Close enough. :)) It
was a surprisingly clean movie in that there was no profanity or bedroom
scenes. Some parts can be rather violent (and realistic), though, so it's
certainly not a kid movie. At any rate, I found to my pleasure that I
understood some of the Thai (just the "hello" greeting and the polite
particles). So now the language feels like it's beginning to open itself
to me.
I've got a hankering to play chess. I had to look up "hankering" to make
sure it means what I thought it meant. :) Too bad there wasn't an
etymology for it in my dictionary. I'll have to look it up in the huge
Webster's Third Unabridged that I got when I won the state spelling bee oh
so many years ago. But I digress. (The problem is that James Joyce's
stream-of-consciousness has started appealing to me a lot, so I now find
aesthetic satisfaction in flitting along from topic to topic like a
butterfly from flower to flower; it may make sense to me, but it probably
feels odd to anyone else reading it.) I've never been tremendously good at
chess (nor can I use "tremendous" in that way without feeling slightly
guilty, since the word actually means "fitted to excite trembling or
arouse dread, awe, or terror," which has absolutely nothing to do with
being "tremendously good" at anything). But I'd like to be. And yet I
haven't time for it. Yesterday I made some icons for the
BYU-UUG site. I need to find a
good Thai dictionary. Mary Haas' sounds like the best.
That last sentence reminds me of an internal debate I've been having
lately. Namely, should singular nouns which end with an 's' tack on an
extra 's' after a possessive apostrophe or not? It seems to be a matter
of taste (both ways are "correct"); which do I prefer? I've been leaving
off the 's' for a while now, but I can't help but wonder if it's more
ambiguous that way. (For example, hepatitis' could be read as the
possessive singular or as the possessive plural of hepatiti. And
yes, I do know that one would never use hepatitis in that way.
This is theoretical, right? :)) Adding the extra 's' makes the form
unambiguously singular and I think looks more aesthetic. So Mary Haas's
dictionary sounds like the best. Yes, I like that more. And yes, if you
think I'm a wee bit too conscious of language, you're right. :)
Wow, it's only 6:56 in the morning and I've already written all of the
above. I'm quite taken with The Garden, a CD by Michael McLean
and Bryce Neubert. (For those familiar with McLean's other work, The
Garden is utterly unlike anything he's done before.) It's orchestral
and grand, rather like movie music. (There's probably a term for it, of
which I am unaware at the moment.) I love music like that!
MPlayer rocks. :) It played almost all of the files I tested
without a hitch. (The only ones it didn't play were Sorenson-encoded
Quicktimes, which is quite understandable.) I tried it with the Anna
and the King DVD and it worked reasonably well. But it did have a
slight synchronization problem (between the video and the audio). I
haven't looked into it yet, but it's probably resolvable with a
command-line switch or something.
Went to stake institute for the first time. (I'm going for the summer
since I'm not taking any religion classes at BYU this term.) I really
liked it. And I found that I can even get religion credit at BYU for it.
I can't wait till next week... :)
Monday, 5-6-02
Fluxbox
rocks. :) I switched over this morning and have been very
pleased with it. Gnome was nice, but I prefer speed over features. Spent
an hour hacking away at a theme (took the Results one and changed the
colors and a few other things). The artwiz fonts are quite nice. I still
need to get the slit apps to load at startup, but that shouldn't be too
hard (I think I can put them in my .Xclients or .xsession or something). I
miss the good ol' days of hacking around in my .xinitrc and configuring
Window Maker by hand. No more desktop environments for me. I took a
screenshot. Once I get the slit set up with
whatever apps I end up using (probably Gkrellm and some Window Maker
dockapps, and bbpager if I can get it to load properly), I'll take another
one. I need to get wvdial working with my Winmodem so that I won't have to
use kppp anymore...
Galeon's tabs are extremely cool. I've been using Galeon for months now
but haven't really used the tabs at all until today. And now I'll never go
back. :) In the past I usually open new browser windows when moving from
site to site (that way I can surf simultaneously and read one page while
another is loading), but that eats up a lot of screen space. Tabs are
much, much nicer.
I'm probably going to run to the BYU bookstore today to get some Thai
tapes (Berlitz, most likely). Learning Thai is almost impossible without
tapes or some other audio feedback, I've found. Sure, you can learn the
script and vocab and all that, but with incorrect pronunciation it's almost
useless. There are 44 consonants in Thai, between 32 and 48 vowels
(depending on who you ask), and five tones. It's insane. :)
For some reason I've felt extremely busy these past few days. And yet I
wonder if I really am. Hmm. There's an overwhelming amount of information
to study about Thailand and the Thai language and Buddhism; perhaps the
size of that mountain is intimidating me. I'll get over it.
I didn't get that MStar job (they called), but that's okay. Time to start
looking again...
Saturday, 5-4-02
Life has been rather busy for the past few days. :) Thursday I got most of
the remaining immunizations, and yesterday I submitted my passport
application. Still haven't had much time to study Thai or Thailand. But
I'm going to start studying Thai for an hour a day. The first major hurdle
to tackle is the pronunciation. I need to get some tapes for that... The
grammar is apparently simple. Actually, at the moment I know very, very
little about it. But that will change shortly. :) I'll need to set up a
regular, scheduled study program, since otherwise I'll become quite
overwhelmed with the massive amount of information to study. All other
languages are on hold till I get back. :) I'll set up a mission page on
here before long, and a Thai page as well.
I'm thinking about getting laser eye surgery before I leave. Pros: I
wouldn't have to worry about glasses or contacts (especially in the rain),
and the cost would probably be much less than the cost of glasses and
contacts over the next forty years of my life. Cons: the immediate cost is
expensive ($900 per eye, I think), my eyes may not have stabilized yet (I
may not have stopped growing yet), and there's always the possibility that
something could go wrong and I could end up blind. If I were relying
solely on my own analytical powers, this would be a rather difficult
decision. But thankfully I have a resource that is infinitely useful:
prayer. The Lord knows what is best for me.
I don't know how long my laptop will last, so I'm putting together a
computer from scratch, to act as a backup. And once it's working, I can
send in the laptop for repairs. It will be very, very nice to leave for
two years and not have to worry about computers. :) (At least my own, that
is.)
Oh, in the excitement of getting my mission call, I completely forgot to
mention that I got my grades a couple of days ago. A's in all my classes
except for Comparative Literature 202H, where I got an A-. (I'm quite
pleased with that, actually, since I was expecting a B- at best.)
Still no word yet on the MStar job. I suspect I'll have to look elsewhere.
I need to take advantage of my unemployed status and put all this free time
to good use. I'm writing an article for the UHEA Right at Home newsletter.
And I'm doing some more artwork for the
BYU-UUG website (icons).
Wednesday, 5-1-02
I got my mission call!!! :) I'm going to Bangkok, Thailand. I'll enter
the MTC on August 21st. That gives me enough time to get the visa and
immunizations. And I'll have plenty of time to start learning the language
(it's supposed to be notoriously difficult) and studying the culture and
history and customs. I'm exceedingly excited. :) Thailand is about as
exotic as you can get. I read a little bit about the language and found
that it will indeed be difficult -- it's tonal. I've never studied an
Asian language before, so I'm used to languages like German and Latin and
French. Thai is totally different. :) The script shouldn't be
too hard to learn. But they don't put spaces between words. The only
punctuation they use are spaces between sentences. Wow. Kind of like
reading old Latin inscriptions. :) I went to the city library and checked
out every book they had on Thailand and Thai. Tomorrow I'll go to the BYU
library, which should have even more books. Oh, on the back cover of one
of the guidebooks I got, it talks about the ancient temples and palaces. I
can't express in words how much that excites me. :) Thailand is primarily
Buddhist, I believe, so I'll be studying Buddhism as well.
Tuesday, 4-30-02
I think I really am going to be a history professor. History and languages
appeal to me a lot. And I love books and old stuff and things
like that. I'm also interested in archaeology -- in other words, not just
the books, but the real stuff that the books are based on. I don't know
yet which part of history I would specialize in -- that'll be the hard
part :) -- but I'm almost certain this is what I'm supposed to do. I could
also teach math on the side. Computers are nice, and I do like web
development and graphic design, but history and books and languages are
much, much, much more fulfilling. It's all too easy for me to get
tired of working on the computer, but I hardly ever get tired of digging
around in books or figuring out old texts. The professor thing fits me
perfectly. Now the trick is to do it and yet not get sucked in by the
books and the library and such, to the point that I lose contact with
humanity. People still matter more than books. And that's the wonderful
thing about history -- it all boils down to people.
Monday, 4-29-02
I think I'm going to put German on hold right now and focus on Spanish.
Why? The chance of getting called to a Spanish-speaking mission is much,
much higher than the chance of getting called to a German-speaking one.
German interests me more right now (because it's not a Romance language, so
it's different), but it can wait. I'll study it when I get back.
Ditto for Russian.
Lisp and assembly language are both tempting me at the moment. :) Lisp (as
well as Scheme) is a very cool extension language, from what I've seen.
Emacs uses it, of course, as does Snd, and I'm sure plenty of other
programs use it as well. Extension languages excite me. (Is this normal?
:)) I'm also thinking of dabbling with databases (SQL, mainly). Too much
to do and not enough time to do it. The perennial plaint. :)
I haven't done much real writing lately, other than my journals and this
website. I feel like writing an essay in defense of children's literature.
And I've been thinking a lot about time lately, and those thoughts seem to
want to be molded into an essay. Whenever I think about writing anything
like that -- essays and the like -- I can hear C.S. Lewis' essays in my
head, his style and voice. It's almost like he's my mentor, in a way. If
I can ever become even half as good of a writer as he was, I will be
perfectly satisfied.
I'm doing a much better job of keeping this journal updated than before.
That's good.
I read a talk by Orson Scott Card,
Towards a Mormon Aesthetic. I liked it a
lot. And now the
writing impulse is upon me. But I'm tired and that destroys motivation.
Fatigue is my enemy. I'll probably take a nap so that the rest of the day
won't be wasted.
I ended up taking a two-hour nap. It worked. :) I wrote the first draft
of an essay on materialism. It really is first draft material,
so I'll certainly have to revise it (tomorrow and later on). I'm not sure
yet whether I've sapped all my writing energy for the day or not.
Hmm, much as I love doing all this writing, I think I need to prioritize my
time. See, there are a few things I must get done before I leave
on my mission, and other things that I ought to be doing before spending
time on things that aren't exactly necessary. (I'm not saying I'm going to
stop writing or anything; of course not. But I just need to make sure I
get everything else done first.)
Sunday, 4-28-02
Found another C.S. Lewis time-related quote somewhat like the one in the
4-25-02 entry:
We are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it.
"How he's grown!" we exclaim, "How time flies!" as though the universal
form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as
if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that
would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to
become, one day, a land animal. [Reflections on the Psalms, chap.
12, para. 17, p. 138]
And here's another quote by Lewis, also on eternity, that I rather like:
I'm pretty sure eternal life doesn't mean this width-less line of moments
endlessly prolonged (as if by prolongation it could "catch up with" that
which it so obviously could never hold) but getting off that line onto its
plane or even the solid. [A Severe Mercy, Letter to Sheldon
Vanauken (5 June 1955), p. 205]
That kind of thinking boggles my mind but in a most delightful way. I
often used to think of eternity as just being time going on and on and on,
which of course seems dreadfully boring after a few thousand years. But I
suspect there's much more to it than that -- something I can't even
imagine, just as the two-dimensional circle in Abbott's Flatland
can't comprehend the third dimension. Eternity can't very well be
that boring, since God doesn't seem to be bored with it. I think
our human perspective is just too limited right now to deal with concepts
like eternity and the infinite, so it's useless to try to figure it out.
We can only talk about it in a roundabout way using metaphors like the
above two quotes.
Saturday, 4-27-02
It still doesn't feel like school is really out. I meant to spend a lot
of time reading and studying German, but oddly enough I've been in a
computer mood all week. Oh well.
Yesterday I put together a CD of my music, called "Into the Sunset".
I tried convolving the files with some various impulse response sounds
first, but they always ended up sounding too muddied (although quite
realistic). I need to find IR sounds from a concert hall or something
like that. At any rate, I ended up just using Timidity's reverb. I
wanted to start recording my music on our digital piano and then playing
it through a cable into the microphone jack on here (there's no line-in
jack), but it was scratchy and so I had to scrap the idea. MIDIs are
okay, but they sound so mechanical and computery. (That's why I wanted
to add the reverb, to try to give some kind of human element
to it.)
I tried entering in the Discourse on Abbaton, the last text we studied
in my Coptic class, but to no avail. Unicode doesn't have very good Coptic
support (you have to use Greek characters for all but the Demotic
characters, which aren't quite how Coptic looks), nor is using <font>
tags working right now (but that's not the way I want to do it either).
Hmm.
I played around with it some more but with no luck. Entering Unicode
characters by hand is very tedious. :) If I do end up going with Unicode,
I'll probably try out Yudit. I may try to get the <font> tags to
work with Coptonew; that may be the easiest route (and perhaps even the
only possible one).
Well, I finally got AbiWord to recognize my Coptonew font (although it
still won't print with it), so at least I can start entering it in. I
ended up making a
font chart to show which
keys correspond to which Coptic characters. I made it by hand in the Gimp
and like the design a lot.
It started raining yesterday afternoon and is still overcast and wet
outside. I love it. :) Knowing Utah weather, though, all the clouds will
disappear in ten minutes and it'll be 90 degrees. Either that or it'll
snow. :)
Friday, 4-26-02
I interviewed with
MStar this morning.
If I get the job, I'll be developing database-driven sites (Oracle) for the
Church. It sounds very, very cool.
I spent four hours out in our backyard digging trenches and helping my mom
put bark between our garden boxes. It felt good to get outside and do
some real physical labor. There's nothing quite like feeling a cool breeze
blow through your shirt when you're covered with sweat. :)
My mission call didn't come today. I'm expecting it on Wednesday. But it
may not show up for two or three more weeks.
Thursday, 4-25-02
My mission call could possibly come today or tomorrow. The sooner the
better. But it will come when it comes, no earlier. I don't think I
really like waiting. :) That reminds me of a passage in Thomas Mann's
The Magic Mountain on waiting. That book's discussions on time
are particularly fascinating. I especially liked the metaphor of the
"silent sister" -- a thermometer with no markings on it. Mann compared
time to a silent sister; we try to fit time into our manmade hours and
minutes and seconds and days and months and years, and yet in reality it's
more like a silent sister. I've been noticing that a lot lately -- time
is far more fluid than I ever realized. This past year has shot by faster
than any previous year. When I was younger, the days went by very slowly,
and I seem to have spent my entire childhood in waiting. But now I wish
it would slow down. Objectively, of course, one second now is exactly as
long as one second ten years ago. Or is it? Einstein's theory of
relativity comes to mind. I know that to me time is dynamic, doesn't sit
still, is hard to catch. But that has always seemed purely subjective. Is
it possible that perhaps there is more reality to it than I give it credit
for? Here's a quote from C.S. Lewis I found some time ago:
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it
you don't feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being
wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that
they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic
creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time.
("How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly
believe it!") In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is
something in us which is not temporal. [A Severe Mercy,
Letter to Sheldon Vanauken (23 December 1950), p. 93]
I do believe in the immortality of the soul, of course, and so this may
merely be an "itching" to get back to the timeless state we once lived in
and will live in again. I can feel the makings of an essay here.
I've been reading Leo Buscaglia's Love. The modern world makes
love sound all mushy and corny, like great-uncle Bob at the family reunions
whom you always try to avoid. And yet that's not at all how it should be.
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matthew
22:37-40)
Without love, life is meaningless. That's what life is all about --
relationships with other people. Yes, one can live in a cave all his life,
secluded and cut off from the human race by choice. But that's not
living. One may as well be dead. Any fulfillment in life comes
through caring for others, through loving. Riches don't bring fulfillment.
No material possessions could ever come close to it. Life is not to be
found in selfish pursuits. Life is to be found in love.
By this I of course do not just mean romantic love. I'm talking about
charity, the pure love of Christ. The kind of love that makes you want to
help another, to bear one another's burdens, to mourn with those that
mourn, to comfort those that stand in need of comfort (Mosiah 18:8-9).
Trying to face life alone is intimidating. We need each other. If we try
to go it alone, we're doomed to failure. Man is a social creature.
My, today seems to be a day for waxing philosophical. :) I don't write in
this blog nearly as much as I'd like to. Today I discovered the online
diaries of
Alan Cox
(Linux kernel hacker) and
Telsa Gwynne
(Alan's wife). I'd forgotten how much I enjoy reading journals and diaries
and blogs. This is why I'm going to be a historian. :) I think finding
those diaries was the impetus for this rather long entry. Now that school
is out I can spend much more time writing. It's in my blood.
Speaking of writing, a few summers ago I had aspirations to become a
writer, so I read all the books I could on the subject and started
freewriting a lot and doing other writing projects (online groups, etc.).
I've been keeping a journal for ten years now and with that plus all the
other writing I do, I can now write very easily. I hardly ever have
writer's block. All I have to do is sit down and the words start coming.
Sometimes this is a problem (the pink Energizer bunny comes to mind :)),
but usually it turns out okay. At any rate, I'm going to start writing
some essays to put up on here. And I need to start on those tutorials...
Last night I spent two hours at the piano, composing a piece. It's been
over a year since I did anything like that. Wow. I've only done a page
and a half so far, but it's going well, and hopefully I'll finish it today
or tomorrow. I'm going to try to get Cheese Tracker to compile so that I
can put together a small MOD. A month or two ago I tried to compose a
piece using SoundTracker, but it didn't work out well. I'm not sure if
that's because I just wasn't in a moment of inspiration or what. At any
rate, when I finish this piece, I'll enter it in with Denemo (I downloaded
version 0.5.9 yesterday and found to my delight that it finally loads files
again without segfaulting :)) and make it beautiful with Lilypond. To do
that last bit I'll need to research TeX fonts and figure out how to get the
results I want.
Wednesday, 4-24-02
Finals are over! I finished my last two (Comp Lit and Coptic) last
night. It feels absolutely wonderful to have free time again. During
school, I often feel guilty about doing anything other than homework -- if
I want to take a nap, something inside me says I ought to be doing
homework, even if I'm dreadfully tired. (That's not to say that I don't
like school. I do; I'm an academic at heart.) But now I'm free, free,
free! :) Last summer it felt wonderful to come home from work and not have
any homework to do for the next day.
Tuesday, 4-23-02
Finally found out how to use Unicode characters in a webpage. :) For
example, here's an umlauted o: ö. Very cool. :) All you have to
do is include the hex Unicode code like this: ö I
need to be studying for my comparative literature final, however, so the
excitement will have to wait till later.
Monday, 4-22-02
"I Dreamed a Dream" (from Les Mis) is an awesome song.
Wow. I reviewed that German stuff I memorized yesterday and was pleasantly
surprised to find that I remembered it all without any problem. Very nice.
:)
Well, I took my Book of Mormon final today (I got 91% on the multiple
choice part, which is fine with me), so I only have two left. I've spent
all afternoon and evening studying for my Comparative Literature final. At
first I didn't want to, mainly because the 4,500-page mass was terribly
intimidating, but once I started upon the task it wasn't very hard, and I
even found it enjoyable. The books are like old friends now.
The hard thing, however, is keeping myself from diving into German. I
checked out a few more books from the library today on it. Just one more
day, Ben, one more day. :) After tomorrow I'll be able to study German to
my heart's content. I have a job interview tomorrow morning. And on
Wednesday I need to start on the graphics for the BYU-UUG site (my logo #4
got the most votes and so it'll be the new logo for the site).
I find it interesting that German separates the idea of obligation
(sollen) and necessity (müssen). I suppose it
shouldn't be a surprise -- after all, English does it
(should/must) -- but Latin uses the future passive
periphrastic for both and so I've gotten used to seeing them together.
Sunday, 4-21-02
I decided to memorize German paradigms today. So I memorized the
conjugations for sein and haben and werden
and hoffen and sehen and the modal auxiliaries (like
sollen and wollen). I also memorized the list of
unaccented prefixes (be-, ent-, er-,
ge-, ver-, zer-) and the declensions for the
personal pronouns (ich, mir, mich;
du, dir, dich; er, ihm,
ihn, etc.). German is delightfully cool. :) I really like
learning a language this way. I'll of course complement it by doing the
induction method, like the Berlitz books. But for me it feels good to
attack it from a grammar/forms standpoint. I love memorizing
paradigms! :) (I'm quite serious, too.) I also memorized around 50 vocab
words from Sharp and Strothmann's German Reading Grammar. I've
decided that instead of studying Russian, I'll focus on French and German,
since I'll use them much more (scholarly works on older languages are
usually written in them or in English). I'll still study Russian
eventually, of course; just not at the moment.
Saturday, 4-20-02
My first two finals are over. Latin went well, and I really liked the
unseen passage (from Caesar's Civil War, I think). American
Heritage went fairly well as well (I got 88.1%, which should end up being
an A with the curve). Only three more finals...
Friday, 4-19-02
The Ball and Cross work is still going along quite well. I've
entered in five chapters so far.
Thursday, 4-18-02
I ended up doing my
resume in AbiWord. I also
did it in LaTeX, using a different model. I need to spend some more time
on it... (Right now finals take precedence, however. :))
I've decided to put together a
page on
Linux fonts, describing how to install them and use them and create them.
After my harrowing experience trying to add fonts to AbiWord and TeX (and
failing in both cases), I'm really feeling the need for an
accurate
guide to the process. It'll have more than just that, though -- I want to
include notes on typography (both on the letterforms themselves and on good
design rules for using type) and examples and such. Probably won't be able
to do much on it till after finals, however.
My mouth is almost entirely recovered from the wisdom teeth extractions,
thank heavens. :)
I applied to a few different places for work for the summer. One of the
jobs was already taken, though. :) I'm not too worried yet. And
it's not the end of the world if I can't find anything before I leave on my
mission.
Wednesday, 4-17-02
Today is my last real day of class -- tomorrow two of my classes were
canceled and in the other one we're having a pizza party. And Friday is a
reading day. I'm still in shock -- the end wasn't supposed to come so
quickly. :) But it's here and I need to start studying for finals...
I'm doing my resume in KWord now, so that I can have more immediate control
over the layout. Once I get that worked out, I'll write a LaTeX style
sheet that gives me the same results. I'm finding out that it's rather
difficult to add PostScript fonts to TeX. Or at least I just haven't found
the easy way to do it. :)
Oh, I put in my mission papers last night! They won't actually get to Salt
Lake till Friday or Saturday, so it'll be two to three weeks after that
before I get my call.
Monday, 4-15-02
This is the last week of school. Wow. We just finished Book One of
Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico in my Latin class. I've
decided that I'm going to start reading Cicero and Tacitus on my own (right
now it looks like Cicero's De Imperio and Tacitus'
Histories). I'm still working on The Ball and the Cross,
by the way.
Friday, 4-12-02
I've decided to try my hand at Russian. The Cyrillic alphabet itself
isn't very hard to learn, but it'll take some work to learn the orthography
(spelling rules) and all of that. I'm excited, though. Today I checked
out a Teach Yourself Russian book from the library and will start goign
over it. Hmm, last semester I studied German during finals week; this
semester it'll be Russian, I guess. :)
The work on The Ball and the Cross is going along fairly well.
It'll be nice when summer's here and I have more time for it. I
want to start digitizing lots of language books from our
university library here at BYU, but no matter how much I want to do it, the
hard reality remains that I don't really have that much time. Especially
since I'll be leaving on a mission in three or four months.
I'm applying for a job doing Unix systems administration and programming at
BYU for the summer. That means it's time to learn Perl. :) I actually
learned the basics a few summers ago, and it's not really that hard. I've
started (reading the Perl 5 Pocket Reference and Ellie Quigley's Perl
by Example, though I think I'll look at Learning Perl next)
and hopefully can pick it up pretty fast. Lisp is also sounding quite
appealing right now. Mmm. :)
Thursday, 4-11-02
Turns out the suture was okay, so I didn't have to get it sewn up at all.
The dentist said it will heal on it's own. That's good. The swelling is
virtually gone, which is quite nice. :) (I think I'll scan in the picture
I took when I was Mr. Chipmunk with mongo cheeks and put it up here once I
get it developed.) I haven't taken any painkiller since Monday afternoon,
and I've been pretty much fine. My teeth are a little raw, granted, but
it's not unbearable. It's very nice having a clear head. :)
My mission papers go in on Tuesday (when I have my stake president
interview). I should have my call within three weeks after that.
I did some proofing for Distributed Proofreaders on Leonardo da Vinci's
Notebooks (in two volumes), which was released yesterday as Project
Gutenberg e-text #5000. Today I did a few hours more of proofing, on
Victor Hugo's L'Homme qui Rit (The Man Who Laughs),
volume II. I'm also proofing Andrew Lang's Pink Fairy Book. I'm
going to start typing in G.K. Chesterton's The Napoleon on Notting
Hill and The Ball and the Cross. Neither is available online
at the moment, to my surprise. Ideally I'd scan them in and OCR the
images, but alas, I haven't a scanner, so I'll just have to type them in
manually.
I've started typing in The Ball and the Cross. Finished the first
two chapters (of twenty). My goal is to have it done by the end of May,
but I really think I can get it done sooner than that. In fact, if I keep
working at the rate I did today, I'll have the book done in just over a
week. (Finals will prevent that from happening, of course, but perhaps I
can finish it shortly thereafter.)
I'm way behind on e-mails but should catch up on Sunday. I always start
to feel guilty when I see thirty or forty e-mails in my inbox, some from
weeks ago, that I haven't yet found time to reply to. Or made
time, rather, since I obviously have the time. :)
Tuesday, 4-9-02
My left suture came undone, so I have to go in today to get it sewn up
again. No more painkiller for me -- I hate being drugged up and the
medication was making me loopy anyway. I'd rather take a small amount of
pain and be lucid. I can't wait till I'm normal again. :)
Monday, 4-8-02
I've been out of it for the past few days. I had my wisdom teeth taken
out last Thursday and I'm still feeling disconnected with reality. It's
a very disturbing feeling. :) I talked with my mom this morning and
editing sounds like an appealing field to go into. Book or magazine
editing, that is, not newspaper editing. I edited the school paper for two
years in high school and that's too stressful for me. (We only published
once a month and that was bad enough -- once a day would be unbearable.
But I suppose I'd get used to it.) I don't really know what I'd major in
to go into that -- English or communications or something, I guess. I
haven't looked into it at all. Math sounds like a nice field as well.
Teaching math, that is. Luckily I don't have to worry about career choices
for a while -- in a few months I'll be out in the world serving the Lord
for two years. I can turn in my papers this Saturday (no sooner,
unfortunately :)). All of my friends are getting their calls. In fact,
for the past few nights I've dreamt about mission calls. That's never
happened before.
Oh, I've decided that I'm really not interested in programming after all
(other than web stuff), so I'm not going to write that Distributed
Proofreaders client. Hopefully somebody else will. :) (Yes, I know that's
not the right attitude to take. But right now I just don't have time --
finals are in two weeks.)
Thursday, 4-4-02
Yesterday I installed Ximian Gnome. It is incredibly cool. I'm very
pleased with it. Oh, I'm getting my wisdom teeth taken out today. Fun
stuff. :) I'm also working on some graphics for the BYU Unix Users Group.
I found a good tutorial on icon design at Ximian's
DevZone.
Wednesday, 4-3-02
Bought a Russian and an Italian dictionary. Yum. :)
Monday, 4-1-02
I bought an Italian and a Spanish grammar today. They're pocket-sized
from Barron's, just like the French and Russian ones I got last week. (The
German one I got isn't by Barron's but it's quite similar.) Very exciting.
:) And I'm sorely tempted to start going through my Middle Egyptian
grammar, my Old Norse grammar, my Old English grammar, and my Sanskrit
grammar. But alas, I haven't the time. School needs attention. And I'm
now going to be doing the graphics for the
BYU Unix Users Group website. And
my to-do list for this site is several hundred items long.
I had my mission physical done today. I haven't really mentioned that in
here -- getting my papers ready -- and I don't know why. Anyway, last week
I had my hair cut, my picture taken (the photographer will have the proofs
ready tomorrow and I'll put the picture up here as soon as it's done), and
my dental exam. Wednesday I'm getting my hepatitis shots and Thursday I'm
getting my wisdom teeth pulled. I'll be able to turn my papers in on April
13th. I can't wait. :) Oh, I suppose I ought to clarify: I'm going to be
serving a two-year mission for the LDS Church. Hopefully I'll leave in
July or August. I'll know where I'm going and when I leave by the end of
April if I'm lucky.
I really have spent a lot of time on the computer and on this
website over the past month or two. I usually don't. Hmm. Anyway, I need
to put together my resume so I can start looking for a job for the summer.
I'd like to do something web-related if I can, preferably with Linux. But
I guess I'll take what I can get.
The
Distributed Proofreaders
project is really cool. Robert Rowe wrote a
Windows
client to make the proofreading easier, and I'm seriously thinking
about writing a Linux client. It wouldn't be too hard. I've wanted to
learn the HTTP protocol anyway. I still want to learn about SQL and study
CSS and PHP and Perl in more depth. I need more time. :) Anyway, I also
want to start proofreading Project Gutenberg books (that's what the
Distributed Proofreaders project is for, by the way). It's a very good
cause and it really isn't that hard to proof.
I wish I could do the site entirely in XML. It would be much nicer and
cleaner. I keep finding myself trying to do things that I can do only in
XML. But alas, that must wait. Perhaps XML will be the standard by the
time I get back from my mission...
Saturday, 3-30-02
I really like CSS. The style/content separation paradigm is a beautiful
thing. I'll write up some stuff on that soon. In fact, I'm tempted to
write that Getting Started with CSS tutorial today. But it depends on
whether I'm able to get my homework done.
I need to start exercising regularly. Every few weeks I suddenly realize
that my resolution to begin some kind of exercise program has failed
miserably, and I vow to really start exercising this time, and then a few
more weeks go by and the cycle repeats. Some day, perhaps. I think I may
start going running in the mornings. That's easiest (convenience-wise),
since I don't need to buy any equipment or anything. And you can run
anywhere, really.
Friday, 3-22-02
CSS is cool. :) I've been reading up on it and I like very
much what I'm seeing. I'll switch the site over soon.
Thursday, 3-21-02
Mozilla is cool. I upgraded Galeon 1.2.0 (I didn't realize the
version that comes with Red Hat is only 0.11.3), which meant upgrading
Mozilla from 0.9.2 to 0.9.9. I hadn't really played around with
Mozilla at all till now. Wow. (FYI, Mozilla is a web browser, the
direct descendant of Netscape.)
Hmm, most of what I write in this weblog is computer-related. My life
actually isn't as centered on the computer as that makes it look. In
fact, I try to spend as little time on the computer as possible. I
need reality. :) Over the past few weeks, however, I've spent
more time on the computer (mostly working on this site) than I thought
I would. Far more. My geeky side (which has been suppressed for
several months) is beginning to surface again. :)
Wednesday, 3-20-02
My tablet came on Monday, but I couldn't get it working till last
night (I spent six hours on it on Monday). It does work now,
thankfully, and is very cool. :) I'm going to start doing a lot more
artwork (drawing-type stuff) soon. I'm also going to revamp this site,
giving it a new layout. I've made a new logo (more colorful,
hopefully) for the transition.
Monday, 3-18-02
My tablet didn't come Saturday, but it should arrive today. I can't
wait, especially now that I've realized how easy the airbrush will be
with a pen/tablet. (Airbrushing with a mouse is clunky and difficult.)
Oh, my Latin test went well. It feels wonderful to have the tests over
with. Only one more this week (Wednesday, but it's take-home over the
weekend). That's good, because once my graphics tablet comes, I doubt
I'll be getting much schoolwork done. :)
Friday, 3-15-02
Almost done with the week of tests. :) Yesterday's test on
Romanticism (Goethe's Faust and The Sorrows of Young
Werther, mainly) went exceedingly well, far better than I had
anticipated. I still have a Latin test today (which should go quite
well) and a religion test next week (which should also go quite well).
I want to get a tablet. Wacom seems to be the big name in art tablets,
but they also have big prices. I wonder if there are cheaper (in
price, not quality :)) tablets out there...
Xine is cool. :) I downloaded the four new Star Wars trailers
and watched them in Xine. (The DivX versions, that is.) The guy who
plays Anakin is, well, not a very good actor. In fact, there seem to
be very few good actors in that movie, judging from the trailers (which
were, sadly, puerile and rather stupid). Star Wars just isn't what it
used to be. At least there'll be nice special effects in this one.
But that hardly redeems a movie.
I ordered a refurbished Wacom Graphire tablet. It should arrive
tomorrow or Monday. I'm quite excited. :)
Wednesday, 3-13-02
The GIMP FreeType plugin is amazingly cool. :) The kerning
feature is the main reason I like it -- kerning by hand is tedious, to
say the least.
Saturday, 3-9-02
Well, as the obsessive-compulsive person I am, I couldn't wait to get
Blank Slate up. :) So, instead of spending the morning studying for
tests as I should have done, I made a new logo (which I like a lot) and
updated all the files for the change.
I really ought to be studying. :) I really want to get to know Sketch
better, though. It's really cool. Kontour is okay, but Sketch
is much nicer. The thought of the staggering possibilities
is exhilarating. I'm giddy. :) What really excites me is the
combination -- Blender/POV-Ray, the GIMP, and Sketch, can be used to
create some really cool art. Beyond that, I want to read up on
typography and composition. There's so much I don't know about art and
graphic design...
I discovered PfaEdit today. Wow. Very cool. It's the only
TrueType/Type 1 font editor for Linux, at least on Freshmeat. There
are some GNU fontutils which supposedly can make Type 1 fonts,
but I think they're rather primitive and not anywhere near PfaEdit. I
wonder if Gill (Raph Levien's program) is still alive. The page was
last updated in 1999, though, so I doubt it. [Update: I e-mailed Raph
Levien; it's not alive anymore.]
I made a bunch of logos for the BYU Unix Users Group. (This past week
new officers were voted in, which means the club is finally going to be
resurrected. There'll be a new website and thus a new logo. My
submissions are on the Visual Art page for now. I don't really like
the ones I have so far, except for #4, which is based on my Checker
image.)
Friday, 3-8-02
The tutorial idea will have to wait a little while. Right now my main
focus is passing the three tests I have this coming week. (I have an
American Heritage test on Monday, a Latin one on Tuesday, and a
Comparative Literature test on Goethe's Faust and The Sorrows
of Young Werther on Thursday.) The other focus is moving the site
to blankslate.net. It shouldn't be too time-consuming. It feels
rather exhilarating to be getting my own domain name. :)
Wednesday, 3-6-02
I came up with an idea this morning for the site. I realized that I
like writing tutorials, and so I'm going to write a Getting Started
series, for all sorts of things (Blender, POV-Ray, programming, Linux,
vi, etc.). Now if only I didn't have any homework... :) Really, I'm
falling behind on my Anna Karenina reading precisely because I
keep working on this site. Self-control, Ben, self-control. :)
Saturday, 3-2-02
That Latin competition went quite well. Far better than I thought it
would, actually. I still didn't know a lot of the vocabulary, but
context helped, and I think I did okay. We'll see. :)
Friday, 3-1-02
It doesn't look like this weblog will be a daily thing; oh well.
School's still going well. I'm in a Latin competition tomorrow
(National Classics Honor Society, aka Eta Sigma Phi). It's my first
foreign language competition of any sort. Should be interesting. I'm
not too worried, though -- I haven't had any trouble translating Caesar
this semester.
I'm still fairly behind on e-mails. Will I ever catch up? :)
Last night I read a short biographical sketch of John Maynard Keynes in
my American Heritage textbook. That flared up an interest in
economics, and now I want to read Keynes' The General Theory of
Employment, Interest, and Money. And as I was walking past my
bookshelves, I saw two travel books (one about China and the other
about Great Britain) and that made me want to start reading as
many travel books as I can find. This sort of thing happens all
the time.
The web design creative urge is still upon me. I have a long list of
changes to make to the site (mostly additions). I really ought to be
doing my homework instead of working on this. :)
Monday, 2-25-02
I'm back in school now. Hopefully it won't take too long to get used
to it again. :) Actually, I was pleasantly surprised to see that I
hadn't forgotten all my Latin. One or two days of school should set me
back to normal. I hope. :)
The web design creative urge is upon me again. :) This site feels like
a house to me -- my hobby is tinkering around with it, adding a wing
here, new furniture there, always expanding or repainting or fixing the
plumbing. It's a lot of fun, and very relaxing. Once this weblog
grows large enough, I suppose I'll move it to a new page. (Which begs
the question, why don't I do it now? :))
I've moved it to a new page. :) I spent a couple of hours working on
the site, as you can tell by looking at the news page. I'd better do
my Latin homework, though. I'm listening to the
Lord of the
Rings soundtrack right now (track #2, the Shire -- ah... :)).
Ideally I would update this weblog every day, but it will probably be a
slightly irregular thing. (Not
too irregular -- as you can see
so far -- but probably not every day either.) I've been thinking about
writing in an online diary (like at
diaryland.com), but chances are that I'll just write in this
instead. More convenient for me.
Friday, 2-22-02
Well, the weeklong break is almost over. It went by fast. I didn't
really do any homework until today. I'm way behind on e-mails (there
are around 40 in my inbox right now). I haven't read too much on
architecture yet. In fact, I haven't done much reading at all over the
break, which is unusual for me. :)
Monday, 2-18-02
For quite some time now I've wanted to have some kind of journal on
this site, but the site news page seemed inappropriate for it. So it
ended up here. :) This will mainly be a place for me to jot down my
thoughts and give you (whoe'er you are) an update on my life. So, I've
recently fallen in love with architecture. For several months I've had
a desire to look into it, but didn't have the time till now. (There's
no school this week because of the Olympics. Hurrah! :) Now I can
actually relax and breathe freely for a few days, without having to
worry about tests or reading or whatnot. I hasten to add that I
do like school, an awful lot. It's just nice to have a break
from time to time.) I went to the library on Saturday and checked out
a few books on architecture, and so far I've read half of one, ABC
of Architecture by James O'Gorman. With any luck I'll be able to
read a few more by the end of the break. Architecture is very
aesthetically satisfying to me. I'll no doubt have more on this as I
read more about it. I really want to read Vitruvius (a classic in the
field), maybe even in Latin if I dare. :)
Oh, a couple of weeks ago I was having a slightly rough day, stressing
out over a test that was coming up. As I walked home from the bus
stop, I started quoting some Shakespeare that I'd memorized for the
test (it was a literature test, on Don Quixote, King
Lear, and The Winter's Tale). I was amazed to see how much
better it made me feel. Now I can understand why those in POW camps
who had memorized poetry and scriptural passages were able to survive
-- reciting rich, living passages is an incredible source of
strength.
At the library on Saturday I also checked out a bunch of language
books, on Ukrainian, Arabic, Serbo-Croat, Nepali, Russian, Greek,
Latin, and Hungarian. And on Friday I checked out a couple of books on
Turkish. Yum. :) On Monday I taught myself the Hebrew alephbet and
vowel system (it was much easier than I thought it would be) and
started studying Akkadian. If it isn't obvious, I really like studying
languages. :)
