Missionary Work

One of my church callings is that of Ward Missionary. It has been a wonderful experience over the last two years or so and I'm thankful for it. Last night I got a little treat when I was invited to attend a missionary training meeting where L. Tom Perry, of the Quorum of the Twelve, taught us. It was a great talk and very inspiring.

Our Stake hosted 11 other stakes for the meeting. The parking lot was jammed and the building was overflowing as Stake leaders and Ward Missionaries from throughout the entire Phoenix Area Mission attended.

I've heard many apostles talk before, but there's something special about being in the same room with them. Elder Perry was informal, friendly, funny and clear about our objectives as Member Missionaries. I feel energized and inspired having been taught by him.

Elder Perry expressed the dire need for missionary work in America by citing the results of a Pew/APCO study regarding perceptions of the church. A couple of points are;

• 51% of Americans have little or no knowledge of our religion.
• 47% of Americans think we do not believe in Jesus Christ.
• A significant number of Americans have a negative opinion of the church.

YIKES! We've got a lot of work to do!

Let me be your DeeJay!

I got a little wrapped up tonight and went wild on my playlist. Mostly I was flashing back to the 80's when music was simply awesome. I slammed in a bunch of my old New Wave faves. I singled out some fun metal and some Elvis too! (That's right, I said ELVIS. If you don't like The King - you're just retarded.) Along for the ride are a couple from the greatest guitar blues artist that ever lived...Stevie Ray Vaughan.



Make sure you check out "Canon in D (Rock Cover)." It's an awesome version of Pachabel's Canon arranged and played on electric guitar by Jerry C, a Taiwanese kid when he was 17 years old! BTW - he recorded it in his bedroom with his computer!

So hook your computer to the best speakers you have, load my blog and let me be your DeeJay.

Always check your child's homework!

That's a pretty liberal school, I'd have to say....

CARDS WIN NFC - Need I say more?

Best of luck in SuperBowl XLIII

Now get those Steelers!

Linux: Where everyone should be!

Microsoft pretty much sucks. Everyone knows it, but we're stuck with it. And before you get started, Mac is no better. In fact Mac is worse in many ways, but I won't elaborate since it'll just take too much time.

The world is locked into Windows and there's no going back. Or is there?

Months ago I was using my laptop to grab videos off my camcorder. One day it worked, the very next day Vista couldn't find my camcorder any more. I also found that my built-in media reader couldn't see some of my Sony memory sticks anymore either. How can a XP Pro SP3 work so perfectly and then MS sticks us with crap like Vista and expects everyone to just gush about it? Worse than that, they're trying for force the obsolescence of XP and force everyone who wants a new PC into using Vista.

After spending three months going back and forth with MS Tech Support, and not getting a fix, they suddenly decided that since my OS came with my computer and I didn't buy a full retail version directly from them that I no longer deserved the pleasure (or misfortune and frustration) of their support. Eventually Vista just quit altogether and MS Tech Support wasn't answering my emails any more.

Long story short - I had to do a clean install of Vista. Everything I had done to make it like I like it was gone and I had to start over. Thank goodness my important data was all backed up to my network drive.

Well, I had work to do. I had been toying with the open-source Operating System Ubuntu Linux for a little while and decided now was a good time to really put it to the test. I set it up to dual boot on my laptop (share with the Windows Vista installation) and got busy. Amazingly everything felt very comfortable and the GUI front-end is Windows-Like and pretty intuitive. Everything on my laptop worked perfectly, but I had to monkey with the touchpad settings a bit.

I was able to complete my video editing project for the church with ease and have been pretty satisfied with the small footprint and high performance I'm getting with Linux. It's more secure and stable that Windows. And the best part is...it's FREE. The OS is completely free and so are tens of thousands of programs that run under it. Open source has a few hitches, but what do you expect for free? Certainly Ubuntu delivers infinitely more than I paid for! (Which totals $0.00)

So far I have used it to do some pretty serious video editing and am now using a free CAD program that's similar in capablity to AutoCAD, which costs $1500.00 or more! Below is a schematic I'm working on for a mod at work right now.

Click for a closer look...

OpenOffice 3 is now available and does everything MS Office does, but for free. Documents are even exchangeable between to two! One small drawback that forces me to keep Windows around is DirectX. PC games just aren't any good without it and it's a product of Microsoft. If you're not a gamer, there shouldn't be anything holding you back.

Linux does take a little more computer saavy, but not much if you use a release like Ubuntu that feels a lot like the Windows interface you're used to. There's a good Knowledge database to go to for help and there seems to be an endless number of forums offering advice and assistance. Here's a cap of my Ubuntu Desktop;


BTW - I made this post from my laptop booted in Ubuntu Linux, using the Linux version of Mozilla Firefox Browser.