Here is another mission photo.  I was with James Nickerson in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, as missionaries, and he took this picture of me.  We were contacting people in an apartment building, and thought the view was pretty good.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has recently announced the planned construction of 5 new temples. The church plans to build temples in Cordoba, Argentina; Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Rome, Italy; Philadelphia, and the greater Kansas City, Mo., area.

View Larger Map

Update: Oct 8:Jared made me aware of the LDS Newsroom Article which gives more definitive locations to the locations of all the new temples. I’ve updated the map accordingly, although some locations may still not be exact.

The following facts refer to the Dow Jones Industrial Average:

• Almost one year ago, the stock market hit an all time high.
• Since then, it has fallen over 29%.
• Today, it closed below 10,000 points. (source)
• And closed about 3.5% lower than where it closed last Friday.
• Which is more than 11% lower than where it closed a month ago.
• This is a 4 year low.
• At one point today, the stock market was down by 800 points.
• Which was the worst intra-day fall since Black Monday in 1987. (source)
• But it rallied near the end of the day, to close with a loss of 370 points. (source)
• This is the 19th largest single-day point loss ever.
• The 1st largest point loss occured one week ago.
• The 1st, 8th, 9th, 17th, and 19th worst single-day point losses have call occured in the last month. (source)
• In the last month, shares of Hewlett-Packard have dropped by almost 9%.
• Shares of Apple, IBM, and Dell have all dropped more.
• The utilities and medial sectors have fallen the most, dropping more than 5% today.
• While the transportation industry has dropped the least with less than a 1% drop.

Update Oct 7:

• On October 7, the stock market dropped another 508 points.
• This is the 5th worst single-day point loss ever.
• Adding today to the list, the 1st, 5th, 9th, 10th, 18th, and 20th worst single day losses have all occurred in the last month.
• It has dropped almost 13% in the last week.
• It has dropped almost 2000 points in the last month, or almost 16% of its value.
• And almost a 33% drop in the last year.  Think about that!  It has dropped by a whole third in just a year!

Here are a few of my notes/thoughts from the Saturday afternoon session of General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

• Elder Wirthlin - Learn to laugh.  Leason learned from his mother: “Come what may, and love it.”
• Elder Holland -Angles are dispatched to help us in times of need.  But not all angles are from the other side of the veil.
• Gerald Causse - Little children have a great ability to learn and trust… the same qualities help open the door to the holy spirit.
• Lawrence E Corbridge - Christ offers a well of living water… He is the bread of life.  He is the only way.
• Elder Christofferson - Building a Zion. Zion is zion because of the attributes and character of its citizens.
• Elder Bednar - Council in all that we do. Prayer becomes more meaningful as you express heartfelt gratitude.

Image Source: Wikipedia

When I was younger, my mom would never allow us to have certain “sugar cereals” except for special occasions like Christmas. It turns out, that my mom had good cause for this.

A recent consumer report reviews children’s cereals and finds that there is a lot of sugar in them.  Who would have guessed?  Oh, yeah, my mom did.

Honey Smacks and Golden Crisp are almost 50% sugar, by weight.  That is gross.  

12 cereals reviewed had as much sugar as a glazed donut in one serving.  A serving size is 3/4 cup–I usually eat at least two servings.

If you are looking for a more healthy cereal: Cheerios, Kix, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Life contain relatively low amounts of sugar and higher amounts of dietary fiber.

Gwen Ifill from PBS

Suppose the moderator of tonight’s vice presidential debates is writing a pro-Obama book. Do you suppose that might produce a moderator bias in the debate?

But that is exactly the case with Gwen Ifill, who is writing a book title, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama which is to be released in January. Presumably, the book will sell better in January if Obama is elected president, providing greater financial reward for Ifill if Biden and Obama’s ticket performs better in the debates tonight.

Is it a good idea to have a moderator who could benefit financially from the outcome of a debate? Of course not.

(Image Source: Used under a creative commons license)

My New Shredder

Recently I purchased a shredder for the things I do not want anyone else to read.  I had one before that I used all the time, but it was so cheap that it would jam like every time.  This time, I didn’t go ultra cheap, but I didn’t go expensive either.

Now whenever I get credit card applications in the mail, or I have old bank statements I don’t want to keep, they can go through the shredder before they are discarded.

The web is built around addresses to web pages, often called URLs. Sometimes, some of these URL addresses can be quite long. Consider the address to a Google map which shows where my house in Oregon is:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=2041+NE+Josephine+Dr,+Hillsboro,+OR+97124&sll=37.09024,-112.412109&sspn=54.79724,118.476563&ie=UTF8&ll=45.540902,-122.985364&spn=0.000749,0.001808&t=h&z=20&layer=c&cbll=45.540753,-122.985334&panoid=XYkzvAe2UII2YNtD0tOp5A&cbp=1,281.96901520324406,,0,5.839042847276948

Not only does that take up several lines, but putting that in an email, instant message, or facebook status could be kind of a problem.

That is why there are several services which can store a long address like the one above, and shrink it down to a small address that is much easier to use. These services store the long address, and give you a short address. When someone accesses the short address, it automatically forwards that someone to the web page at the full long address.

Four of the more popular services that do this are: bit.ly, TinyURL.com, is.gd, and tr.im.

All these services do basically the same thing, but their interface and length of the small URL they give you might be different. As an example, I took the long Google maps URL above and made it smaller using each of the services:

In the future, if you see an address like on of the above, realize that it is a shortened URL to somewhere else. If you ever find yourself needing to shrink a URL, go ahead and give one of these free services a try.

For those who want to run their own URL-shrinking web service, look at lil’url, free open source software that you can install on your own web server.