Ammon Shepherd

Blind Sabbath

I read John chapter 8 today. This is the story of Jesus healing the blind man on the Sabbath day. I think there are two important lessons to learn here. One about faith, and the other about the Sabbath day.

Faith

Jesus heals a man that has been blind from birth. All of the Jews know him (the Pharisees at least), so they know that he is truly blind. But in their hard hearts and spiteful minds, they can not see the great miracle that happened, and only see the supposed violation of the law of the Sabbath. The Pharisees had always wanted a miracle to happen for them to believe Jesus, yet here is one they can not deny, but won’t believe because they interpret the act as a violation of a law. The Pharisees question the man, trying to understand, and trying to find some proof that Jesus is of the devil. I love the reply of the man who was healed.

30 The man answered and said unto them, Why herein is a marvellous thing, that ye know not from whence he is, and yet he hath opened mine eyes.
31 Now we know that God heareth not sinners: but if any man be a worshipper of God, and doeth his will, him he heareth.
32 Since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born ^ablind.
33 If this man were not of ^aGod, he could do nothing.

The man, through logic and faith, testifies that any man who can heal a blind man must be of God. The Pharisees, with pride and unbelief, cast him out. Jesus seeks out the man and asks him if he believes on the Son of God. The man wants to know who he is, and upon learning it is Jesus, immediately believes and worships him.

Such great faith. We must also have such great faith. It comes only when your heart and mind are open to receive it.

Sabbath

The other lesson to learn is about the Sabbath day. Division arose among the Pharisees because some believed the breaking of the Sabbath law greater than the miracle done. Others questioned, can a sinner do such a great miracle? This brings out the great debate between the letter and the spirit of the law. In this case Jesus broke neither, but it is a question and debate we should all have with our Sabbath observance. Jesus did not break the letter of the law. As he explained at a different occurance, even the Pharisees will feed and water their animals, should not a human being be blessed with site?

I have read often how the current prophets and apostles have declared that the Sabbath day should be kept holy. That great blessings come from this observance, and great calamities come with breaking it. I’m always amazed at people who claim to have a strong belief in Jesus Christ a testimony and desire to follow his commandments, yet can not follow one of the simple Ten Commandments. They shop, work, and play on the Sabbath day, and it’s just not right. They break the law and the spirit when they do not have their hearts set on serving other people and worshiping God.

Anyhow, those were a couple of thoughts I had today.

Eat the flesh, drink the blood

As I was skimming through John chapter 6 looking for instances of prayer, I slowed down and read the reply of Jesus to the multitude who had followed him after he miraculously fed them bread and fish. They wanted more of that tangible food for which they had to do no work, but was provided by the Son of God. At least four times in this chapter Jesus uses the phrase “verliy, verily” to begin his reply to the people. This does not happen often. It means literaly “truely, truely” and signifies that what he is about to say is of utmost importance (as is everything he says).

Continue reading Eat the flesh, drink the blood

Toothbrush Analogy

This was one of the previous posts…

These are thoughts I had once while thinking about members of my family who are inactive, and while brushing my teeth. I wondered if they will become more active as they get older, have kids, and realize the great things they missed out on.

Toothbrush Analogy

As a kid, you might not like brushing your teeth. For whatever reason, you’ve decided that it’s not for you. Your parents might have made you do it. You might not like the dentist visits: they make you feel uncomfortable, you might not believe the things they say, etc. Perhaps the thought of having to brush morning and night, day in and day out, no breaks, no holidays, just makes you upset. For whatever reason, you just don’t like to brush.

Well, one day you are going to realize the importance of teeth brushing. It might be as a kid, still, when you get 5 cavities that hurt like the dickens. You might realize that if you take care of your teeth you won’t get cavities and they won’t hurt. It might be as an adult when you have to pay for your own cavities, or when you have your own kids and have to pay for theirs. It might even be when you’re putting in your brand new set of dentures, that you finally realize that if you had taken care of your teeth, that you would still have some.

The Gospel is the same way. Whether you don’t believe, or don’t want to. Whether your parent’s made you go to Church and Seminary, or because you don’t like the bishop office visits, or because you have to live the commandments morning and night, day in and day out, no breaks, no holidays… Or for whatever reason you don’t.

There will come a day when you will have to acknowledge and finally realize that the Gospel is true. You will have to acknowledge that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the true Church of God in these times. You will bow to your knees and acknowledge that Jesus Christ is your Savior, Creator, and Redeemer. The day may come when you feel the Spirit at a meeting you were forced to attend, or when you see a small miracle happen in your life. It may come when you are having hard times as an adult and finally humble yourself to God. It might come when you have kids of your own and you realize how much the Church and the Gospel and Christ can really do for you. It might even come after you die and are forced to acknoweldge the further existence of your spirit. It might be when you stand before Jesus Christ and take an account of all your thoughts, words, and deeds-good and bad-and are judged accordingly. Whatever the reason, one day you WILL realize the TRUTH.

Don’t wait for your teeth to fall out before you realize that brushing your teeth is a good thing. And don’t wait until you are standing before our Savior Jesus Christ to finally acknowledge that what you have been and are being taught is the truth. Gain a testimony now! Do the simple things to gain the greatest. Say your prayers, read the scriptures, live the commandments. Prepare yourself so that day may be a Great one and not a Terrible one.

Meeting your wife's expectations

This is the talk I gave in Elders Quorum today. You’ll notice a part where I challenge the brethren to pick a chore to do around the house in order to be more helpful. I told the Relief Society beforehand that I would do so. The brethren weren’t please with me! 🙂 This principle, though, is more than meeting your wife’s expectations, but meeting Christ’s expectations. Becoming a better person, even like He is.

You’ll also notice the previous posts are missing. Well… I inadvertently deleted them while setting up missionjournal.org. And to make it worse, the posts for Mission Journal aren’t working either.

Anyhow, enjoy the lesson.

Continue reading Meeting your wife's expectations

MediaWiki’s version information

I spent way too long looking for MediaWiki’s version information. Most applications store the version info in a file or in the database. MediaWiki is a HUGE mess of code and database. I finally found it in a file. It’s in includes/DefaultSettings.php and is stored as a variable – wgVersion. This is for post 1.3.7 versions of MediaWiki, perhaps even earlier versions.

I write this here because no amount of searching turned up this information. I found it through a series of lucky greps. So, to help out in Google searches:

where is MediaWiki’s version information stored?

locate MediaWiki’s version info

MediaWiki version file

MediaWiki version info

WTTGG #4

This week is much more historical…

Goodies #1: Traveler IQ Challenge – Test your knowledge of geography as it is today not 100 years ago (there’s the history tie-in). I’m not so good. I can’t get past the 6 level…

Goodies #2: New York Divided – This one is all about history. It’s even from the History Channel. It’s an amazingly beautiful animation about New York’s ties with slavery. Very well done.

Goodies #3: Randomwocky – You’ve all heard the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, and know of the many made up words. I thought it would be fun to re-create the poem using randomly generated consonant-vowel-consonant groupings. It makes the poem even more nonsensical in places, but some of the ‘new’ words are funny!

WTTGG #3

I almost forgot for this week, but found some stuff today, so here goes….

And a small disclaimer, or explanation first. Instead of just making this a list of cool stuff out there, I’m going to try to tie it into the field of history or academia. That will get me to think a bit more and hopefully stay true to my desires to have this blog about history and new media.

So… First off we have a couple of gadgets, of the software kind:

Gadget #1: Paintbrush. [Mac only] Have you ever wanted to just make a quick drawing or picture in Mac. It’s not that easy without Paintbrush. It gives Mac users a semblance of Microsoft Paint. Now, what’s the application to history, et al.? Ummm… I don’t know either. I’ll get a strike for this one…

skitch
Gadget #2: Skitch.com This is a new service that allows you to quickly take an image and annotate, draw, and share. You can grab photos from your iPhoto library, take screen shots, or import images. When you’re done drawing and such, you can upload it to your own account on skitch.com and share your photos. Check out my test photo at http://skitch.com/mossiso/ This might come in handy as another way for historians to share photos and their ideas. A teacher could upload some images and draw specific things… yeah, it’s a stretch too.

Tip #1: US National Archives Research Online and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. OK, OK, here’s a real tip for the historians. I’ve been looking for some information on the “Quarz” project started by the Nazis in late 1944. There is supposedly some photos at the National Archives, but I haven’t found them yet. I was tipped off to this topic by a friend and co-PhD student at GMU who works at USHMM. She knew of some nice had drawn maps that relate to project Quarz. So I took some digital copies of these maps, and want to use them in a project this semester. The above linked resources help in searching for documents, images, etc.

Well, the tips, tricks, gadgets and goodies were a bit lacking this week. Enjoy what you can of it.

Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets and Goodies #2

So, here it is. The second week of TTGG. I found a bunch of things this week. Enjoy!

Goodies #1: There’s a lot of hype lately about Twitter. Don’t understand it? Here’s a video that explains it in plain English. [Google Video] It still seems a little tooooo much for me. I don’t want to know what someone is doing every minute of the day, and I don’t want to have to update my info all of the time too. I’m an old fashioned tech-noob.

Goodies #2: We’ve got no T.V. at home. It’s a conscious and wise decision. It means more time to spend with each other, reading books etc. But we get the hankerin’ for some media entertainment every once in a while. I looked on pbs.org last night and found a cool show with good quality video feeds: Wired Science. The best were the “What’s Inside” segments featuring Chris Hardwick. He’s a pretty funny guy.

Gadgets #1: http://www.scribd.com/ This is a cool project for getting your documents in a viewable format without having to worry about programs. It will take a pdf, word document, power point, and anything from OpenOffice or the OpenDocument format, and display it in your web browser (using Flash and JavaScript). I’m thinking this will be ideal for letting people view research papers and such on a digital historians site. It would be cool to see this in JStor as well. Their current interface is a little clunky (one page at a time, slow loads, no text copy, etc). It would probably be even easier for them to get content on their site. Come to think of it, this would be great for any online journal.

They call it iPaper (everybody’s on this “i” bandwagon), and have a platform version available for you to embed the service on your own website. Look for it here one of these days.

Tip #1: Change your Leopard Dock even more using the LeopardDocks App from LeopardDocks.com I like the jet black look.

Trick #1: (not really sure what the difference between a tip and a trick is, but it allowed alliteration and acronyms to work) Take a quick snapshot of your screen in Mac OS X. Hit the Command-Shift-4 keys at the same time, and your mouse becomes a cross hair. Click some where, drag the box, and bing-o! a picture on your desktop appears. Quick and easy!

TipTrick #2: Get different languages in your Mac OSX dictionary. It makes looking up words in other languages easy. And, for the second part of this tiptrick, some people use QuickSilver for fast application launching and fancy program work. I haven’t had the time to figure it out, but stumbled upon an easy built in tool that works similar: SpotLight. Hit Command-SpaceBar and start typing. Type “Firef” and Firefox is your first result, hit enter and it opens the application right up! You can change the preferences as to what shows up first, and what shows at all. Type in a word, and SpotLight will give you a definition. Nice! Now the fingers seldom leave the keyboard!

Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets, and Goodies #1

I think I’ll try and start a weekly tips, tricks, gadgets and goodies post. It will cover the neat-o things in the tech world that I come across during the week that don’t have a whole lot to do with history, but are fun nay-the-less.

dock
Tip #1: Custom Leopard stacks and drawer images
Tutorial for customizing your stacks icons.

make a new folder, name it “0000” for sorting by name, or “touch -mt 2020010101 foldername” for sorting by date added.
copy the image from Get Info, paste int onto the Get Info for the new folder.

Add your own image to your drawer using the steps shown here at usingmac.com.

And you get something like above.

Goody #1: Geotag your photos
Check out the Geotag application which is helpful for spatially locating your great photographs when your camera has no GPS built in.

Graphical representations of genealogy

I have this thought, and it was brought to mind again by an article on Wired which linked to this artists (Jason Salavon) work with the US census data. Basically, he took the US census data over 200 years and created an image with a ribbon of color representing each county.

My idea is similar, kind of. While thinking about projects to do for my history and maps class this semester, and while talking with a colleague, I wondered how one could graphically represent ones genealogy. Most of us in the United States have ancestors that came from somewhere else. Many of us have ancestors that came from multiple somewhere elses. Looking at my ancestry alone I claim Arizona, Colorado, Utah, England, Sweeden, Germany and I’m sure several other places I don’t yet know of. One thought as to how to do this would be with a world map and lines and dots representing locations and familial connections. The lines and dots would be in gradients of color, each color representing a date. I tried doing a mock up in Photoshop quickly, but it wasn’t working right. I’ll have to do it in Flash, since that behaves like I expect. Flash might be a better platform anyways, because the map is then dynamic and can be dragged, zoomed, and dots and lines can be given data associated with them.