The following is long because I want to make sure I approach the subject carefully. It is indeed a soft criticism upon statements given by a man I believe to be an Apostle of God, so I can understand if the very idea can be seen as offensive to some. I apologize for that offense, but I believe the criticism is valid.
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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
My Thoughts on Pres. Packer and Pres. Beck at the 2010 LDS General Conference
Monday, April 5th, 2010 — NoCoolName_Tom
2 Comments | Posted in Doctrine, History, Mormon, Personal, politics | Read on...
Faux-Wordpress Plugin Note II
Friday, March 5th, 2010 — NoCoolName_Tom
Okay, I think I’ve got the repository nonsense worked out.
Feel free to checkout or browse the code at:
https://svn.xp-dev.com/svn/tpdFauxWPPlugin/trunk/
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Producing a Faux-Wordpress Plugin for Symfony, Part IV
Friday, March 5th, 2010 — NoCoolName_Tom
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How I Use Netbeans 6.8 and Symfony 1.2
Monday, January 4th, 2010 — NoCoolName_Tom
I am expirementing with using a full-fledged IDE for web development at work. Until recently I used gEdit; most people don’t know that gEdit can be extended via plugins to become a fantastic development environment. However, one thing I could never get to work was auto-completion based upon functions and classes in PHP. However, the speed of using gEdit, as opposed to Eclipse, was amazing and I never could quite get the hang of editors like Aptana and Eclipse. Recently, I found that Sun’s Java-based IDE, NetBeans, had added symfony support and I wondered how useful that might be. I tried it and loved it. Using NetBeans is not without issues, however. It’s still a bit buggy (that might be because I’m using the development code) and memory usage is about what you’d expect from a Java-based editor (ie, sometimes really, really high). Still, it’s worked out quite well and I’d recommend giving it a try.
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All Finished…
Sunday, July 5th, 2009 — NoCoolName_Tom
Whew, that was a LOT of writing. I wasn’t really expecting that when I decided to do this short series. Still, I think I got into the hang of keeping a regular blog. I doubt I’ll be able to keep it up daily like I have been, but we’ll see. I have a few idea for other interesting posts but for the next while things will get a lot more mundane around here.
I hope everyone enjoyed this series. Perhaps later I’ll go back and source material and such, but until then I’ll leave the comments open on all of them so that people can continue to add (or fix) material.
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Arrival in the Valley
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 — NoCoolName_Tom
If you found yourself, through some fluke of a time machine or something, walking the streets of 1870s Salt Lake and said to someone, “This is the right place!” it might be that they would have no idea what you were talking about.
“Um, yeah, it is; what are you talking about?” they might respond. Why? Because we don’t know whether Brigham Young actually said these famous words or not.
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Happy Independence Day!
Friday, July 3rd, 2009 — NoCoolName_Tom
Happy Independence Day everyone!
I’ve been writing so much in the blog for the past few days that I really have no idea what to say here. I hope everyone is enjoying the Fourth!
Nothing is more American than Fireworks and hot dogs and hamburgers! (Except that, of course, fireworks are Chinese, and hot dogs and hamburgers are of European descent.) Still, I guess we decided to put them together first, so go and enjoy some of those!
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1 Comment | Posted in Personal, politics | Read on...
Women of the Exodus
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 — NoCoolName_Tom
It’s probably no secret that Brigham Young and Emma Smith never much cared for each other after Joseph’s death. Their personal distaste for each other eventually transformed into a quiet cold war between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints that only really died out in the 1960s and 70s. Brigham Young possibly dissolved the Nauvoo General Relief Society, of which Emma was the elected President, because of this battle of wills between two very stubborn people, and didn’t bother re-forming the society for nearly twenty years, at which point he chose Eliza R. Snow to be President (and the RS Presidents have been called by the President of the Church ever since).
However, just because their organization was at this time absent did not mean that the women crossing the plains were content to simply let that be. Early Mormon women were strong characters and have always continued to be. The founding of the Nauvoo Relief Society corresponded with the fledgling Women’s Suffrage movement (which died during the Civil War only to rise again a generation later but that’s another topic entirely), nowadays viewed as the first wave of American feminism. This feminist strength continued throughout the history of Utah, a territory and state which saw women involved in many levels of organization and politics nearly since the beginning of the territory.
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Adam-ondi-Ahman
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 — NoCoolName_Tom
This might be a little rushed and odd – this post was requested and I don’t have much free time to write it in. As such I really don’t have many sources. Feel free to call me out on anything wrong. I’ll try to either find sources or edit the post with the correct information.
Adam-ondi-Ahman (usually called simply Di-Ahman by the Mormon settlers) is located in Northern Missouri and was a sizable settlement during 1838. As one of the Mormon headquarters during the Mormon War of 1838 it held Mormon militia prepared to defend themselves and to take, by force occasionally, property from the enemy in recompense for property taken from them earlier by mobs of Missourians (the 1838 conflict is a messy affair and while the Mormons were, by far, not the most violent they did participate in fighting, plundering, and property burning of their own; this is the heyday of the Danites, a band of supporters of Joseph Smith whom he used sparingly but they often got out of control in following the prophet’s counsel).
The word had first appeared in a revelation given in 1832 (D&C 78). In this revelation the word was not defined, although the reference is quickly followed by “Michael”, who was identified by Mormons as the name Adam was known by before and after his mortal life. In 1835 another revelation related an event in the early religious history of humanity where Adam blessed his righteous posterity in a valley called Adam-ondi-Ahman.
A site settled in 1838, called Wright’s Ferry, was renamed by God through Joseph as Adam-ondi-Ahman (see D&C 116); Joseph prophesied that in a future day Adam shall come and visit his people and in this place the Ancient of Days, a title variously interpreted by Mormons as either Adam or God (as for Adam-God, nope, not going there!), will sit. Another revelation a few months later castigated the Saints for covetousness and poetically referred to Adam-ondi-Ahman as the “place where Adam dwelt”. These are the only canonical references.
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2 Comments | Posted in Doctrine, History, Mormon, Personal | Read on...
Brigham Young’s Transfiguration
Tuesday, June 30th, 2009 — NoCoolName_Tom
In August of 1844 the Church was reeling. Joseph Smith had been murdered at the Carthage jail months before and there was a serious power vacuum in Nauvoo. To make matters worse, Anti-Mormon sentiment in Illinois had not died down and seemed to be continuing to rise. The Church needed direction and leadership, but Joseph had not instructed the general membership of the Church as to what would happen to the Church after his death and had only privately left instructions for some people (like the Twelve). Joseph’s death had been sudden and unexpected and questions abounded: What of the Nauvoo Temple, still to be completed? What to do to lessen the lingering anti-Mormon feelings in Illinois? Should Nauvoo be fortified against attack or should they prepare to leave? Where would they go? If they left how would they sell their homes and their land; what would their creditors think? How should the Church deal with the massive debt it was in?
All of those questions centered, however, upon one all-encompassing question: Who’s in charge?
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4 Comments | Posted in History, Mormon, Personal | Read on...
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