Moved to new location

I've moved Top of the Mountains to TopOfTheMountains.net and all future posts will be there. Blogger.com, you're great and I'm gonna miss you, but this is goodbye.

Linklights and routers and hubs, oh my!

I am stupid. :) Tonight I decided to try troubleshooting our Internet connection (it's been down since Monday), so I called my roommate up and he gave me the IP address to access the router via HTTP. Did that and it looked like everything was in order, but I did notice that the Internet link wasn't lit up. (There was a WLAN link that was, however, and I'd assumed it was the link.) So I tried unplugging the cable that was hooked up to the Internet link and sure enough, it didn't make any difference, so I knew that there wasn't any link. Then it dawned on me: on Monday night I'd been moving stuff around in our living room, which is where the hub is, and it was entirely possible that I'd unplugged it without realizing it. Two seconds later my theory was proved correct, and the Internet's now back up and working fine. If only I'd tried that on Monday instead of today... ~sigh~ At least it was an easy fix, though.

Joseph Smith: The Movie

This morning I took the bus up to Salt Lake with a friend and watched the new Joseph Smith movie. Amazing. I really, really liked it. Before I saw it, I was half afraid it wouldn't live up to my expectations, but there wasn't any cause for complaint (except that Pennsylvania was spelled "Pennsylvannia" in one of the subtitles and one of the subtitles at the very end wasn't quite centered, but those are completely inconsequential). I cried a lot. The cinematography was beautiful, the music was great, the acting was wonderful, and overall it really was an amazing movie. Five stars.

At work I've been fiddling with DotNetNuke, trying to get everything ready. Today I learned how to make my own skins and containers and it's working pretty well, thankfully. As for Blank Slate and company, I'll probably be switching to BlueHost.com and Joomla and Wordpress tomorrow if all goes well. And I've got to read half of The Great Divorce by Monday for the C.S. Lewis Society meeting. :) Last night I worked some more on the book design (for Translating Scripture). I wish I had a few more days before school started... ~sigh~

Back to the shelves

It's time for another round of What-Books-Are-On-Ben's-Desk. :) We have the scriptures, of course; then Orson Scott Card's Shadow of the Hegemon (I'm a few chapters in), Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things, the Bible in Spanish and German, George MacDonald's Phantastes, Sheila Davis's The Craft of Lyric Writing, Allen & Greenough's New Latin Grammar, Mortimer J. Adler's Ten Philosophical Mistakes, Teach Yourself Sanskrit, C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, Arthur Henry King's Arm the Children, Moreland and Fleischer's Latin: An Intensive Course, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Baker's Introduction to Old English, Tolstoy's War and Peace, Susan Cooper's The Grey King, Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book, the Spanish hymnbook, Lonely Planet's Don't Let the World Pass You By!, Henry B. Eyring's To Draw Closer to God, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, How to Read German, Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, and C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces (which I need to return to the library soon). I'm not actively reading all of them at the moment (they're all at varying levels of activity) and now that I realize how many there are, I'll probably be putting some of them on the shelf for the time being -- school starts in four days and I won't be able to devote as much time to reading as I'd like. ~sigh~

More LibraryThing

Well, I've discovered that LibraryThing is very addicting. :) I couldn't help myself and so I ended up adding around 70 books to my collection (online, that is). You can check out my profile here: crowderb. Two interesting things to look at are my tag cloud (the tags I use -- larger = more frequent) and my author cloud (the authors in my library). This isn't quite a representative sample yet since there are still 500 or so other books I haven't entered in, of course. Tagging the books is a lot of fun, especially because it's a better way to categorize them (rather than finding a specific category each book must fit into, I can assign any categorical terms to each book).

LibraryThing

Have I mentioned LibraryThing yet? It's an online book cataloguing system with tags and all sorts of neat stuff. Right now I only have one book listed, but I started entering my books into an Excel spreadsheet this evening (300 so far, out of roughly 600 if my memory serves me correctly) and I'll put them into LibraryThing sometime this week. LibraryThing lets you enter 200 books for free; to get unlimited, you have to pay $10/year or $25 for a lifetime account. I'm pretty sure I'll end up getting a lifetime account. Why is LibraryThing worth $25? Well, the social aspects of it are quite intriguing -- you can see who else owns books that you own and see what kinds of other books they have (similar tastes), you can write/read reviews, and of course there's the king-of-the-hill attitude about having so many books (the largest "library" on the site right now is around 8,000 books, so I've got a ways to go :)). I'll post a link to my account once I get more books up.

Ontology is Overrated

Found a very interesting article on ontology (classifying information -- like the Library of Congress system and the Dewey decimal system, for example): Ontology is Overrated.

Blank Slate

I'm thinking about moving to a CMS for Blank Slate. Coding by hand is cool, but it's the 21st century and I think I'd rather focus on the content. Using a CMS will help me work on the site more often, too -- I won't have to be at my laptop to make changes. Right now I'm looking at either Joomla or Mambo, though there are a few others like e107 and Drupal that are still possibilities. Today or tomorrow I'm going to sit down and give Blank Slate a good think-through, deciding on what I want it to be (goals, content to deliver, etc.). Expect a much sharper focus from Blank Slate and Top of the Mountains in the next few weeks.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder

After six posts in a single day, one day missed feels like a long time. :) The Internet connection at my apartment has been down since Monday night (hopefully they're getting it fixed right now), thus no post.

At work I've been writing a content management system for the Center's websites, but yesterday I had an epiphany: why should I reinvent the wheel when there are other CMSes out there that could do the job just as well? Since we're developing on .NET (~sigh~), there weren't as many choices available, but I did find DotNetNuke. It looks very promising and I'll be testing it out today and tomorrow. It's like an answer to a prayer. :)

I've started using del.icio.us. (It's an online bookmark manager but it's a lot cooler than that description makes it sound. :)) It'll be nice to access my bookmarks from anywhere, since I'm on my work computer half the time and my laptop the other half. And tagging is an ingenious concept. More on that later.

Last night I met with one of my friends and started planning out a CD we're going to put together. We'll write all the songs for it and then get it recorded (he'll provide the vocal talent and he has a friend down in Cedar City who has a recording studio). So the great songwriting adventure begins. :)

If you haven't noticed, I have a penchant for diving into a thousand projects at the same time. I really ought to go to juggling school... As of right now, the four main projects I'm working on are the Translating Scripture book design/layout (which is my top priority this week), Beyond, this songwriting bit, and entering the Mayhew Contest in all seven categories (visual arts, music composition, playwriting, short screenwriting, essay, poetry, and short story). And there are plenty of smaller projects as well. ~sigh~ Better busy than bored, right? :)

Thailand photos on Flickr

I've started posting some of my mission pictures on Flickr: Thailand Photos

Restoring civility

Check this blog post out: A Few Tips on Restoring Civility

A plethora of posts

And I read this on Creating Passionate Users:

LESS EGO

Most of you already know our mantra on this -- "Users don't care about YOU--they care about themselves in relation to what you offer." It's simply not about you. My co-authors and I believe--quite literally--that our "secret sauce" for why our books have been so successful is because we work very hard to take our ego out of the books. We are not 100% successful (we're human), but it is our number one priority to try. (One of the ways this shows up is in the number of topics we choose to leave OUT. Our job is to help you learn, not show you how smart we are.)

We believe that if we write these with the intention of what readers will think about us, then we probably aren't doing the learner any favors. We do not write so that people will say, "Wow, these authors sure know their stuff." We want people to say, "Wow, I know Design Patterns now." We did a very detailed analysis of several hundred Amazon reviews of our books against our closest competitors, and discovered dramatic differences in the language used in the reviews. The most important benchmark we were looking for is that our readers would use first-person language. In other words, we want our readers to talk less about us, and more about themselves. We are delighted if someone says, "these guys are really tacky and could seriously use some writing skills, but I actually LEARNED something."

It's often a conflict of interest to write a book (or blog) meant to teach or inspire, with the goal of furthering your own reputation. What's good for your reputation (i.e. demonstrating your deep command of the topic) may be dead wrong for the readers. And this is true for just about anything--are people listening to music to be impressed with the artist, or for how the music makes them feel? Are they eating at a restaurant to be impressed with the chef, or because of how the experience of eating there makes them feel? Are they buying a Mac to be impressed with Apple, or because of how it feels for them to use their Mac?

Hmm, I'll definitely keep that in mind when blogging from now on.

[Bookland] The book experience

I read this on 50 Books and thought it really hits the mark on the book-reading experience:

Because they appear on the printed page alongside articles about world events and local news, book reviews have somehow got it in their head that they are pieces of journalism. As such, writers of book reviews dwell in sensory deprivation tanks where their analysis of each book they read can percolate in a bubble of hermetically sealed objectivity.

Now, out here in the real world where a few of us live, books are read under slightly different conditions: while standing on buses, in hurried snatches in doctors' waiting rooms, while waiting anxiously for a phone call after a job interview, on beaches with a glass of sangria wedged firmly in the sand next to your towel, blurry-eyed by the light of the nightlight while rocking a teething baby.

Books are also obtained in different circumstances that affect our emotional response to them: as gifts from beloved friends or hated co-workers, as found objects in rental cabins, in the mail from the bloody book of the month club you keep forgetting to cancel, in the bowels of a used bookstore after years of searching.

There are a thousand other factors that make our experience of a book highly subjective: a dislike of certain authors and genres, a tactile distaste for hardcovers or for paperbacks, an irrational prejudice against a character because they share a name with someone you loathe, and even -- yes, it's true -- a visceral reaction to a book's cover.

So why, then, the pretense of objectivity, a pretense that's all the more ironic and unnecessary given that book lovers are the first people you can rely on to appreciate and understand -- and enjoy -- the environmental and emotional factors that colour your experience with a book?

Bloggishness

Once I switch to BlueHost (which will hopefully be within a week or so), here's the plan. I realized that there's no point in creating three new blogs when I can use categories to sort posts (that's one of the reasons I'm switching to Wordpress). Top of the Mountains will remain my main blog, but I will create a new blog, Bookland, for all my book posts. (See, I don't post often enough about technology or education to warrant a whole blog, but I will indeed be posting enough about books to make it worth it.) Two blogs (three, if you count Beyond Development) are much easier to manage than four.

In addition, I'm going to be revamping Blank Slate, adding stuff about Macs and libraries and lots more. So my three main projects this week are the book design, Beyond, and website/blog redesign.

Money matters

It has been a hair-raising morning. A couple of hours ago I decided to switch to BlueHost.com for my web hosting company, since they give you 10gb storage and 250gb/mo bandwidth for only $7/month. (I'm going to move to Wordpress as well, which I'll talk about in a moment.) So I put in my debit card information and click Submit, expecting it to charge me $7 for the first month. (Mind you that there's nothing on the order page to lead me to think anything else. The only dollar amount on the page is the $6.95.)

Imagine my surprise when the next page says it has just charged $166.80 to my account. It was easy enough to figure out what had happened -- they'd charged me for the full two years in one fell swoop -- but frustrating because they didn't say they were going to do that. ~argh~ Then my eyes widened as I realized I only had $50 left in my bank account. ~gulp~

As I went to my bank website, yup, it had just overdrafted my account by $116. I've accidentally overdrafted a couple times before and it isn't any fun, and overdrafting by such a large amount (comparatively speaking, of course -- remember I'm a student :)) wasn't any better. At that moment I wished I'd used my credit card instead, which would at least give me some time to pay it off.

Then I realized rent was due yesterday. (This is the first time I've forgotten, just for the record. :) Usually I pay five or six days in advance.) I paid it with my credit card, but as soon as I'd done so I remembered that I only had around $340 worth of credit left -- which meant that the $275 or so for rent combined with the $116 overdraft advance was going to max out my card and still have some $45 left over. Bad. Very bad. It was at this point that the nauseating feeling in my stomach started to turn into emptiness. It was also at this point that I vowed to myself that I am going to take charge of my financial matters and not let things like this happen any more, at least if I can help it.

And then, after a very sincere prayer, the thought came into my head to call the hosting company and see if they could "undo" it. So I called their support line and explained the situation, and the guy said he'd cancel my account and re-credit my card. Hurray! Even better, he said BlueHost.com would pay the overdraft fees if there were any. Very nice. They'll definitely have my business as soon as I get $166.80 into my account. :)

Right and wrong

In the last hour of church today I was about to raise my hand to answer a question when the following thought appeared in my mind: Why do you want to answer this question? I took a mental step back and saw that my plan wasn't necessarily for the spiritual edification of those around me, as I'd thought, but rather was for my own vain pride -- to make other people think, "Wow, he's so spiritual and so smart!" It was a humbling realization, to say the least.

And then ten minutes later the class discussion turned toward that very thing: doing the right thing for the wrong reason (primarily about service but it holds true for anything). I think we understand that concept easily enough, but we seem to be blind to it in ourselves. I certainly was.

Now, the purpose of bringing this up is most emphatically not to demean service and good works and any of that. Quite the contrary. I think it's time for a few examples: when we serve someone else, are we doing it because we care for them and want to help, or are we doing it because other people will see us doing it (including the person we're serving) and think, "Oh, he/she must be a good person -- look at them serve"? I doubt that the majority consciously decides the latter, but I suspect it may often pop up subconsciously without our realizing it. Similarly, do we go to church to be close to God and learn more about Him, or do we go for the social aspect ("What would they think of us if we didn't go?" or of course merely to socialize) or out of droned habit or something else?

Again, the fact that we may be doing some of the right things for the wrong reasons does not at all make the right thing wrong. If I can't feel the Spirit while reading the scriptures because I'm trying to fill a quota and don't really care, it does not follow that the scriptures are devoid of the Spirit and that we shouldn't bother reading them.

Enough about the problem; what can we do about it? I don't claim to have all the answers and I hope there can be a discussion about it through the comments. Two things: first, we have to see if it's in us, and recognize it for what it is. That will hopefully lead to a desire to change, to do things for the right reasons. Second, we can ask God to change our hearts, to wipe away the fake architecture we've constructed inside and replace it with a celestial palace, one fit for a King. I'm sure there are other things as well -- the floor is now yours.

Blogology

Happy New Year!

This morning in the shower I learned a few things about blogs. First, I personally like blogs that are devoted to a single subject area, rather than grab bags that you can't really classify. (Maybe that's because I'm a future librarian and have to classify things. :))

Second, when I read subject-oriented blogs (library blogs, for example), it's ever so slightly annoying when completely non-library-related stuff pops up. I suppose one could call this tangential material -- posts that don't fit with what the blog says it's about. But on the other hand a mostly personal post that somehow works libraries into it is good. (Let me rush to add that I'm not against personal posts at all, as you can no doubt tell by looking through the archives. And I don't think I'm saying that such "tangential material" is bad per se -- just that it's slightly grating against the user experience, that's all. If I'm expecting library stuff, other material usually seems inconsequential.)

Third, I found that I judge a blog by its title (particularly as relevant to the subject I'm interested in). For example, when I'm looking for book blogs, I'm inevitably drawn to the ones that have "Book" in their title. That's the rare case where the subject is commonly part of the title; usually I look for titles that are witty and give promise of good, deep, intelligent discussion.

Having said all that, I'm going to split Top of the Mountains into four blogs later today. ToTM will remain as my forum for religious/philosophical/political discussion. My second blog (and these are all unnamed for now) will be a book/literary blog, covering books (of course), library stuff, writing, C.S. Lewis, and languages. Technology will be the topic of my third blog, with discussions about Macs and programming and web design and stuff like that. Finally, my fourth blog will be about education -- homeschooling, teaching, etc. I haven't really written much about that yet, but I plan to homeschool my future kids and so I want to start studying up on it. So anyway, that's the plan, and I'll put it into effect later today (or early tomorrow morning -- it really depends on how soon I can come up with suitable names for each of these new blogs :)).

And addressing the second issue above, these four blogs (the Fantastic Four, hah! -- I'm kidding, of course) will be subject-specific. That is, they'll stick to their topics and I won't introduce tangential material. I guess that leaves me high and dry with no place to put personal stuff, but that's not really a bad thing. :) (That's what journals are for, right?) Anyway, I think this is the right thing to do and will result in better blogging.

Side note: Googling "blogology" returned 109,000 results; "blogosophy" (which was an alternative I considered as the title of this post) returned 13,600. I guess it's pretty clear which term the people have chosen. :)

Out with the old, in with the new

You didn't think I'd let the year roll to an end without posting some New Year's resolutions, did you? First let me announce (in a soft and somewhat sheepish voice) that I've looked through my logs and discovered that I read 31 books in 2005. Not too bad -- especially when you consider the people who don't read a single book after high school -- but then again, I'm aspiring to be a librarian. And I could have done so much better, too: I didn't read a single book in January or February, then read one in March, one in April, two in March, zero in June, seven in July, six in August, three in September, four in October, one in November, and six in December.

1. So, with that in mind, next year I will read, read, and read some more. At least 70 books, let's say. Preferably over 100 but we'll see. :)

2. Get Beyond to a usable state, hopefully a 1.0 release.

3. Start exercising. Really. :)

4. Learn how to cook so I can move beyond scrambled eggs for breakfast and pasta for dinner every single day.

5. Spend a set amount of time writing each day, and not just freewriting or journal writing but actual pieces -- "real" writing. :)

6. Read all the C.S. Lewis books I haven't yet read.

7. Brush up on my Latin so I can take Latin 301 in the fall.

8. Update Blank Slate more regularly than once a year. :)

9. Visit Thailand this summer.

10. Reply to e-mails within a few days of receipt.

11. Continue to post in this blog every (or every other) day, and write better posts while I'm at it.

12. Start working at the BYU library, in preparation for grad school.

These aren't in any particular order, by the way -- just in the order they popped into my head (which I suppose gives somewhat of an indication as to how pressing they've been in my thoughts lately...maybe). I could go on for another forty or fifty items but twelve is a nice even number (it's a pity I couldn't keep it to ten, huh).

Anyway, I've spent the last hour or so reading through various and sundry blogs online, and I discovered two that I like a lot and will certainly be on my blogroll whenever I get it up. The first is So Many Books, and the second is Rhetorical Response. If only there were more blogs like these! I'd write descriptions but in all reality they can speak for themselves, better than I could do. Check them out!

Books, books, and more books

It was a dark and stormy night. Wait, it's not night yet. Nor is it particularly stormy, per se -- it's more drizzly than anything. Days like these are made for curling up on a comfy couch with a good book in front of a roasty fire. But this is BYU housing and I doubt a roasty fire would go over too well, especially since I don't have a fireplace. :) I did enjoy the end of Till We Have Faces earlier today, as my reward for cleaning the apartment. (Side note: I didn't actually need a reward -- cleaning is a reward in and of itself, and I really do like it.) Part I was long and didn't feel like vintage C.S. Lewis, and I was wondering what on earth was going on -- was I missing something? -- but then Part II began and it all clicked together. The final scene was wonderful. In retrospect, it would've been nice to know the story of Cupid and Psyche in advance, but on second thought it was rather a fun surprise to find out that the basic storyline is Greek. At any rate, I liked the ending and thought it was well worth the read. George MacDonald's Phantastes is next on my reading list. I read it years ago but can't remember much of what happened. It's fitting to read next, considering that it pretty much changed C.S. Lewis's life. Oh, I haven't mentioned yet that I joined the C.S. Lewis Society (local BYU club) the other day. It looks like we'll be reading The Great Divorce. More updates later.

I finally decided to go visit the used bookshop a few blocks away. I don't know why it took me so long -- months and months -- but I'm glad I went. My wallet's in turmoil, though. ;) It felt soooooooo good to wander among the tall stacks of books, with all sorts of tucked away corners formed from the seemingly thousands of bookshelves. If it had been a library, I would have curled up in one of the corners and read for an hour or two, but since it was a bookstore, I figured that probably would have weirded the proprietors out. My main concern right now, though, is to persuade myself to read books from the library first and then only buy the ones I really like. I ended up buying John le Carre's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Silmarillion (I used to have both, but I gave my copies to my younger brothers), and Luther's German translation of the Bible (in the old Gothic script). I'm definitely a sucker for books. :) (It's a good thing I'm going to become a librarian and not a bookstore owner. If I ever tried to run my own bookstore, I doubt that I'd ever be able to part with any of the books. :))