We are now on the afternoon church schedule. The meetings now start at
12:30 p.m. and end at 3:30 p.m. The afternoon schedule is quite nice. I can
sleep in, have a leasurely morning, and leave for Church about 12:15.

Testimony meetings always start with a bunch of the kids standing up to
bear their fledgling testimonies. It’s good for these kids to stand up and
express a little bit about their beliefs. We’ve gotten to know a few people
in the Ward. I like this place and enjoy being here. It has started to feel
like home.

My brother Perry also has a web log (see the link on the right). He’s been
collecting lists from people about the year 2004. It’s worth checking out
the comments to his blog entry. There are some things that I’m quite happy
about:

1. Internet connectivity. Slowly but surely I can be connected to the
Internet wherever I’m located. Having connectivity across Europe this fall
seems quite incredible to me.

2. Photography. I ran across a website the other day that featured images
of people the author had met around the world over the past year. I’ve
taken lots of pictures of things and perhaps it’s time to start taking more
pictures of people.

3. Family close by. Not since we lived in Chardon, Ohio have we lived
reasonably close to family — particulaly family that don’t require a long
distance phone call. In Chardon it was Nina’s family and here it is my
family.

4. New beginnings that aren’t so very new. It’s a new year that is barely
distinguishable from last year, but the arbitrary New Year affords an
opportunity to change some things.

Life is good for us!

————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

The annual Sacrament Christmas Program is underway. The Primary children
are singing right now — a round that is quite spunky and full of rythm.
They are certainly enthusiastic and actually quite good.

The Ward Choir is also singing and I’m sitting on the stand in the middle
of the bass section. Nina has left on her way to Orem to spend a couple of
days with the grandkids while Heather and Ty are in England. It’s now the
Young Women’s turn to sing. There must be about 30 or more of them. They
also sound great. I sure do like Christmas music.

The Choir is singing two numbers written by Sally Deford, one of
my absolutely favorite people. One of these, A Manger Filled With
Love is next on the program. A very lovely number featuring a flute, a
Sally trademark. We started with her arrangement of O Little Town of
Bethlehem which really does the hymn great justice.

The Bishop is speaking now and we’ll end with Joy to the World. I
love to sing the hymns at Christmas. May the Lord’s choicest blessings be
in your lives this Christmas season!

————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

The command to cause the e-mail to be read and posted appears to be
working correctly. The next step is to make that happen on a regular
basis. I’ve now set up a job on the web server that should run at 15
minutes past each hour and pick up any e-mail destined for the web log.
That’s in about 35 minutes from now, so I’ll send this e-mail and wait
to see if it shows up in the blog as expected.
—
Roland K. Smith
E-Mail: rksmith2@earthlink.net
Web Log: https://www.rnsmith.com/

The new weblog also includes the ability to send posts in by way of an
email. I’ve run one quick test that appeared to work correctly and this
is a much more formal test of the system. I understand that there’s a
replacement module that will also take email posts from my cell phone
that includes a picture taken by the cell phone and put that all on the
web. That actually sounds like it could be interesting. So, I want to
get this process working correctly, then plug in the replacement
capability that is supposed to work with a picture phone, and then test
that.

It’s a Saturday morning in Pocatello, Idaho. It’s about 24 degrees
outside and there’s frost on the ground. No snow, however. It’s about
time for the snow to come in copious quantities! The forecast has some
possibility of rain tomorrow. Meanwhile, we’ve no particular agenda
today. Nina wants to go uptown to check out a couple of things and I
think I’ll tag along. The rest of the day will be spent getting my
development server setup so that I can do testing there rather than on
this web server. When I do that, I’ll be able to get rid of two
computers on my network. That will cut down on the heat and noise in the
computer room and will make things a bit less congested. Life is very
good and Christmas is upon us! Merry Christmas!
—
Roland K. Smith
E-Mail: rksmith2@earthlink.net
Home Page: http://home.earthlink.net/~rksmith2/
Web Log: https://www.rnsmith.com/

When I’m not in my right mind, my left mind gets pretty crowded.