Jacob’s Blog

I was looking through my live bookmarks on Firefox, which is simply the titles of RSS feeds (or in this case, the Atom feed), and I found something unusual.

Where I usually find the latest posts to the Official Google Blog I found instead a title that read:

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3 (P.S. Just t…

That was all I could see. When I clicked on the live bookmark, I was taken to the following URL:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-fix-your-blog-pleeasssee-3-p.html

which turns out to give a “Not Found” error. Furthermore, the Offical Google Blog and its Atom feed also return 404 errors.

So what happened to the blog? Was it hacked?

So I’m the webmaster for the Rex Lee Run website. I have been for three years now. It is a fun job, because I can count all the people who visit the website, and I feel like I’m making a difference. This year has been the largest Rex Lee Run ever. Over 2000 people ran in this year’s race. That is a lot!

Because we use an outside timing source for measuring the race times, I don’t personally have access to any of the race results. Hopefully they will be posted on the site of the people who do the timing, RunnerCard.com . I don’t usually do any work on weekends, but I provided a link to runnercard.com from the Rex Lee Run website. Sometime Monday I guess I’ll copy or include better links to the actual results.

5 movies I can watch over and over:

• The Princess Bride
• Star Wars: A New Hope
• Monsters Inc.
• The E.T.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The last 5 songs I’ve listened to:

• Theme from Spider-Man
• Dig-It
• Revolution
• Falls Apart
• Starry Eyed Surprise

5 people I think may secretly be aliens from outer space:

• Dr. Allred, a physics teacher I had a few years ago
• Richard Simmons
• Dr. Phil
• LeBron James
• Sara

5 occupations I would never do:

• Burger Flipper
• NFL Quarterback
• Professionally play poker
• Assassin
• Plumber

5 books I would like to have more time to read:

• The Book of Mormon
• Paradise Lost
• Standing for Something
• Organizational Effectiveness
• Signals and Systems (nerdy, I know)

5 ways to perfectly spend a nice afternoon:

• Cooking hamburgers over charcoal, and sharing them
• Cooking victory cake and watching BYU sports
• Serving others
• Going on a walk/hike with good conversationalists
• Reading the Book of Mormon while listening to really good classical music

5 quotes I made up myself:

• True discovery of self comes only through selfless service of others
• If you don’t study as a companionship, you fail as a companionship (referring to gospel study as a missionary)
• What is it is?
• Remember to vote, maybe this year it’ll count.  (referring to BYUSA elections)
• I’m awake, honest (referring to what I said to my roommate this morning)

The last 5 foods I’ve eaten:

• A dang casadilla
• Corn chips
• Cookies and cream icecream
• Pepperoni (plain)
• Oreos

5 people who should comment on this post, but probably won’t:

• Sam
• Bruce
• Mooney (I have no idea who Mooney is, but he should really should comment)
• James
• Rachel

Sometimes I think that some LDS people try too hard to take upon themselves the attribute of humility. In attempting to be humble, they are fearful of saying anything that may put themselves in a positive light. It is sometimes taken further and the attempt to put themselves in a negative light.

Of course, saying, “I’m the smartest man in the world,” wouldn’t really be humble. But the opposite statement, “I’m the most stupid man in the world,” isn’t humble either. There is a big difference between not building ones self up, and putting ones self down.

I think I’ve been somewhat guilty of this in the past. It is difficult to be humble, and yet not be self degrading. It is important to remember who we are, children of our Heavenly Father, and realize that we are too important to think poorly of ourselves, but also at the same time, remaining humble in the grand scheme of things.

I was recently reading the Official Google Blog and read a post titled Stay in Ctrl Ctrl which was about Google Desktop coming out of beta. They added a new feature called Quick Search Box which allows you to press the Ctrl key twice, get a search box, type in the name of an application or document, and quickly launch it. I’m a Mac user, and so Google Desktop doesn’t really interest me that much. But the quick search box seemed very similar to some functionality provided by an application called Quicksilver. This is a very popular (and free) application that allows users to get a quick search box by using a Ctrl+Space key combination. Then the user can type in just a few letters of an application or document and launch or open the selected item. I’m glad that all my windows friends will finally find some easy document and application launching through Google Desktop. Odd though how similar it is in concept to Quicksilver.

Sometimes we feel like we are misunderstood, or we are curious to understand why people interact with us in the way they do. I would like to think that I’m optimistic. I think that generally people will treat you the way they think you want to be treated. This doesn’t always mean that they will treat you the way you want to be treated, or the way you should be treated. I propose that there are three main contributions that help people figure out how they should treat you and interact with you. Continue reading How people view you…

Recently I’ve been thinking about what makes a talk at church, or a lesson at church, effective. I’m sure there are many contributing factors to effective teaching, but there is one that I want to bring up: believing you will change someone.

You have to have faith, to truly believe that someone will listen to you, and that someone will be changed for the better because of what you say. Of course, to have faith in something requires action. So your preparation must be aligned with the focus of making the learners better people. Pray to know what to teach and how to teach it. Teach the doctrines to impact lives, and teach, truly believing that it will happen.

Where there is no vision, the people perish. (Proverbs 29:18) If the teacher doesn’t have a vision of people’s lives changing for the better, it won’t happen. If the teacher doesn’t have this vision, then the most people will get from the teachings is a smug feeling, which won’t last.

I just read this from BYUCougars.com that describes just how difficult it will be to participate in the BYU vs. Houston men’s basketball NIT game tonight. Basically, unless you want to go down to Houston, the only ways you can be informed about the game is either listening to KSL radio, or watching the delayed and buggy game tracker stat thingy.

Normally, you can listen to KSL over the internet, but that won’t even happen tonight. It also wont be on TV at all, not even tape delayed.

I just want to express my disapointment that there isn’t any way for me to watch this very exciting game. I don’t know who is at fault, but you are not on my good list today.

I have for you a fruit pie
all you need to know is why
what you have to do…
is figure out the clue
which is, mathematically,
the date, numerically.

(To win you must post a comment by midnight. Sorry that I didn’t give you any more time.)

Ok, so this is a little late, but I was going to make up t-shirts that encourage people to vote for their student body president. The t-shirts were going to say:

Remember to vote! Maybe this year it’ll count.

It just seems that every elections there is a team that drops out or is disqualified.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recently writing some web applications in the PHP language. I have been writing my application in PHP 5 because I really like its ability to support object-oriented programming.

I recently read a very good post at jero.net which talks about what I might be able to expect from PHP version 6. A lot of it seems exciting, but not exciting enough.

PHP is such an easy language to pick up that many PHP programmers don’t spend enough time picking up good habits, and end up writing bad code. From what I’ve been able to gather from Jero’s comments, PHP 6 will help developers loose at least a few of some old bad habits. This is a welcomed change.

I think PHP 6 should increase its object-oriented programming model. It would be nice to have return type hinting, and to be able to do parameter type hinting with primitive types.

Also, I would like to see object-oriented programming methods used with some of the core PHP functions. For example, it would be nice if some functions threw exceptions instead of errors or warnings. I think catching an exception is a lot better than trying to deal with the “@” operator and dealing with various errors.

PHP 5 is being slow to catch on. I think that is mostly because Linux distributions have been slow to include PHP 5 and many server environments are even slower to upgrade their systems from something that has been working and tested. If I remember right, PHP 4 was also slow to catch on. If PHP 6 comes out soon, I think we will see many people make a slow, eventual switch from version 4 directly to version 6. If PHP 6 comes out later rather than sooner, I think we will see at that point that most people have made a switch to version 5, and we will again see a very slow adoption period for the latest version.

I thought this up last night while trying to fall asleep.

One can only find oneself when they are engaged in being selfless.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about who I am, what my personality is, and what the true essence of my existence has been. I realized that I have discovered more answers to these questions and have learned more about myself when I am busy serving others.

I’ve been working on a web page template to use in an upcoming project, although it might as well be used on thing like this blog or other project. Anyway, it is art, and it is a work in progress. It is fully XHTML complient (I think) and it is starting to come together. I am trying to figure out though how exactly to make it better. Feel free to take a look at it and let me know what you think.

This article about Cyberduck, a file transfer program for OS X moved here.

March madness is just around the corner. Unfortunately, when it comes to Basketball, March isn’t quite as fun because there are fewer home games. From now on (until next year), all my basketball will be on TV.

I was looking at BYU apparel (shirts and caps mostly) and found that Amazon.com has fairly competitive prices. I’m not looking into buying anything right now, but maybe next year I’ll get something.

Anyway, there is a nice BYU/UofU basketball rivalry on Thursday. I think that Utah was the last team to beat BYU, but that was only because so many of our players were sick. I’m making a victory cake, and anyone who wants to view the game is welcome over at my place to watch the game and eat cake. The game is a late one — it starts at about 10, but you are welcome over.

Update: BYU lost. Shoot.

Congradulations to BYU Men’s Basketball with their victory over New Mexico tonight. The win ends the regular season, with BYU in a tie for 2nd place in the Mountain West Conference.

The game tonight was one of the most exciting I’ve ever seen. President Monson even spoke at half time (which justifies skipping stake conference to go to the game).