Music and stuff

I've been really busy with school and work and haven't had much time to post anything on here, but I'll start making time. Promise. :)

So, yesterday I submitted my first song, "Will I Leave a Legacy?", to the Church music competition. I don't really care if it wins anything; the main thing was to finish it and send it in. And now that's done, so I can finally start writing more songs. Nashville, here I come. Just kidding.

Miscellanea

First off, Google is a lot cooler than I realized (click on more >> and you'll see what I mean).

Next, I discovered Answers.com the other day. It is amazing. Check it out.

I also somewhat stumbled across RSS/Atom and aggregators, which are really quite neat. (If you don't know what Atom is, go to What Is Atom?)

Here are a handful of cooking blogs I came across as well:

Cooking for Engineers
Bay Area Bites
101 Cookbooks
TastingMenu.com
The Food Section
Obsession With Food
Chez Pim

And here's an article on cooking blogs from the Washington Post: A Food Blog for Every Taste

Other random sites: Terraserver (aerial maps), USGS National Map Viewer, The Shifted Librarian, Word of the Day, and Bloggies.

Zipped language detector

The elements of style is an article from February 2002 (Economist.com) about some researchers doing linguistic analysis. "Using zipped files, they can identify the authors of documents and reconstruct the family trees of languages." It's a very interesting technique.

Cambodian royal blog

Today I ran across Sommaire, the blog of His Majesty Sihanouk, King of Cambodia. Quite interesting -- one doesn't really expect a king to get into things like this, but it's fascinating. Oh, it's in French, by the way.

Maxwellian reading

In reading part of Neal A. Maxwell's biography, I found this interesting little nugget:

"What was said of C.S. Lewis could aptly be said of Neal: 'Behind a compulsive writer usually sits a compulsive reader.' And Neal's writing taste clearly reflects his reading taste. He's had little interest in fiction, preferring 'things concerned with the issues of the day.' For years he has devoured biographies of political leaders, works of military and political history, and religious essays, especially those of such British 'believers' as George MacDonald, G.K. Chesterton, and C.S. Lewis. One senses a connection here in his curiosity about able leaders, their lives and their language. He has instinctively wanted to learn from and about people of influence who drew with good motives on the power of the word (see Alma 31:5). A leader's biography should teach us how to be leaders, just as a disciple's biography should teach us how to be followers of Christ." (A Disciple's Life, chapter 48.)

For the angels to look upon

"What could you do better for your children and your children’s children than to record the story of your life, your triumphs over adversity, your recovery after a fall, your progress when all seemed black, your rejoicing when you had finally achieved? Some of what you write may be humdrum dates and places, but there will also be rich passages that will be quoted by your posterity.

"We hope you will begin as of this date. If you have not already commenced this important duty in your lives, get a good notebook, a good book that will last through time and into eternity for the angels to look upon. Begin today and write in it your goings and your comings, your deeper thoughts, your achievements, and your failures, your associations and your triumphs, your impressions and your testimonies. We hope you will do this, our brothers and sisters, for this is what the Lord has commanded, and those who keep a personal journal are more likely to keep the Lord in remembrance in their daily lives."

President Kimball Speaks Out on Personal Journals (Dec. 1980 Ensign).

True at all times

I read the following scripture this morning and it really struck me:

"And they were all young men, and they were exceedingly valiant for courage, and also for strength and activity; but behold, this was not all -- they were men who were true at all times in whatsoever thing they were entrusted.

"Yea, they were men of truth and soberness, for they had been taught to keep the commandments of God and to walk uprightly before him." (Alma 53:20-21)

Freedom's crowning hour

Found this neat poem this morning:

Morning Break
by Owen Seaman

You who have faith to look with fearless eyes
Beyond the madness of a world at strife,
And trust that out of night and fear shall rise
The dawn of ampler life;
Rejoice, Whatever anguish rends your heart,
That God has given a priceless dower
To live in these great times and play your part
In freedom's crowning hour;
That you may tell your heirs who see the light
High in the Heaven -- their heritage to take --
"I saw the powers of darkness put to flight
I saw the morning break."

(From Star of 2000.)

Germanic languages

For those doing research in older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old Icelandic/Norse, Middle/Old High German, Frisian, Old English, etc.), Sean Crist's Germanic Lexicon Project is a great resource for old grammars and primers and dictionaries. He's scanned several out-of-copyright books and put the images online, with a portion of those OCRed and/or in a nice text/HTML/XML format. My own digitization of Henry Sweet's An Icelandic Primer is on the site as well (that's where I originally got the images). I'm considering digitizing an early edition of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer but haven't made up my mind yet.