Now, what do we hear in the gospel which we have received? A voice of gladness! A voice of mercy from heaven; and a voice of truth out of the earth; glad tidings for the dead; a voice of gladness for the living and the dead; glad tidings of great joy. How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those that bring glad tidings of good things, and that say unto Zion: Behold, thy God reigneth! As the dews of Carmel, so shall the knowledge of God descend upon them!

This is D&C 128:19. Joseph and the Saints are in Nauvoo, working on building the Nauvoo Temple. Section 128 is a letter from the Prophet on the subject of Baptism for the Dead; this doctrine fills him with such joy that he practically bursts out in song! The Gospel, the Good News of Christ, does indeed give us great reason to rejoice.

The Saints had been trough some hard times up to this point–driven out of New York, Ohio, and Missouri; the Prophet Joseph had gone into and come out of Liberty Jail; at the time of this letter Joseph was in hiding due to the intense persecution–and yet he speaks of “A voice of gladness” and “glad tidings of great joy”. Joseph continues:

And again, what do we hear? Glad tidings from Cumorah! Moroni, an angel from heaven, declaring the fulfilment of the prophets—the book to be revealed. A voice of the Lord in the wilderness of Fayette, Seneca county, declaring the three witnesses to bear record of the book! The voice of Michael on the banks of the Susquehanna, detecting the devil when he appeared as an angel of light! The voice of Peter, James, and John in the wilderness between Harmony, Susquehanna county, and Colesville, Broome county, on the Susquehanna river, declaring themselves as possessing the keys of the kingdom, and of the dispensation of the fulness of times!

Here Joseph reflects on some of the great events of the Restoration. In May, 1829, Joseph and his scribe Oliver Cowdery had been translating the Book of Mormon for just over a month, when they felt they needed to inquire of the Lord concerning “baptism for the remission of sins” that they had been reading about. It was while they were praying that an angel appeared to them. Joseph described the events:

We still continued the work of translation, when, in the ensuing month (May, 1829), we on a certain day went into the woods to pray and inquire of the Lord respecting baptism for the remission of sins, that we found mentioned in the translation of the plates. While we were thus employed, praying and calling upon the Lord, a messenger from heaven descended in a cloud of light, and having laid his hands upon us, he ordained us, saying: Upon you my fellow servants, in the name of Messiah, I confer the Priesthood of Aaron, which holds the keys of the ministering of angels, and of the gospel of repentance, and of baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; and this shall never be taken again from the earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness. (Joseph Smith History 1:68-69)

This angel was John the Baptist, the same who baptized Jesus Christ, now a resurrected being. John the Baptist gave Joseph and Oliver the Aaronic Priesthood. After this Joseph baptized Oliver, and Oliver then baptized Joseph. The words of John the Baptist are also recorded in D&C 13. I’ve always wondered somewhat about that last promise, though: “and this shall never be taken again from the earth until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness.” “[G]ospel of repentance” and “baptism by immersion for the remission of sins” I understand, but what about the “offering unto the Lord in righteousness”. What is the offering? What does it have to do with the Priesthood today?

Section 84 of the D&C tells us more about the Priesthood; it contains what is known as the Oath and Covenant of the Priesthood. This section makes reference to the offering mentioned in section 13. In verse 30 Christ is explaining some of the different offices of the Priesthood:

“…the offices of teacher and deacon are necessary appendages belonging to the lesser priesthood, which priesthood was confirmed upon Aaron and his sons. [31] Therefore, as I said concerning the sons of Moses–for the sons of Moses and also the sons of Aaron shall offer an acceptable offering and sacrifice in the house of the Lord…”

Now skip to verse 33-34:

For whoso is faithful unto the obtaining these two priesthoods of which I have spoken, and the magnifying their calling, are sanctified by the Spirit unto the renewing of their bodies. They become the sons of Moses and of Aaron, and the seed of Abraham, and the church and kingdom, and the elect of God.

“They become the sons of Moses and of Aaron”–we can become the sons of Moses and of Aaron, and thus we share in the responsibility of preparing this “acceptable offering and sacrifice”, this “offering unto the Lord in righteousness.”

We’ve learned something else about the offering as well–that this offering is to be offered “in the house of the Lord”.

Well, D&C 128 was talking about Baptism for the Dead, which happens in temples—let’s look back there:

Behold, the great day of the Lord is at hand; and who can abide the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appeareth? For he is like a refiner’s fire, and like fuller’s soap; and he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi, and purge them as gold and silver, that they may offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness. Let us, therefore, as a church and a people, and as Latter-day Saints, offer unto the Lord an offering in righteousness; and let us present in his holy temple, when it is finished, a book containing the records of our dead, which shall be worthy of all acceptation. (D&C 128:24)

This offer which John the Baptist spoke of is, or at least part of it is, genealogy and temple work: “a book containing the records of our dead”, presented “in his holy temple”.

Now, in order for this to happen, we need to be worth to enter the temple. And because there’s so much work to be done, we need to preach the gospel to increase the number of hands doing this work. That’s the three-fold mission of the Church, redeeming the dead, perfecting the saints, and preaching the gospel. And it all ties back to the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood.

Brethren, shall we not go on in so great a cause? Go forward and not backward. Courage, brethren; and on, on to the victory! Let your hearts rejoice, and be exceedingly glad. Let the earth break forth into singing. Let the dead speak forth anthems of eternal praise to the King Immanuel, who hath ordained, before the world was, that which would enable us to redeem them out of their prison; for the prisoners shall go free. (D&C 128:22)

Cydia

Flashlight
iBlacklist
iGlassSol
PdaNet
SBSettings Location Toggle
WebSearch
WinterBoard

App Store

Amazon Mobile
BGG
Easy Wi-Fi for AT&T
Google Mobile App
Movies
The Scriptures

Web Apps

http://m.rememberthemilk.com/ (http://ideaharbor.org/rtm/)
http://scripturesapp.com/
http://wsdot.wa.gov/small/ (http://ideaharbor.org/t/)

Local Historical Societies

Local organizations will often collect information about families who lived in their area, such as the Minnesota Historical Society and the Kosciusko County, Indiana USGenWeb Project.

Google Books

Google Books scans books and makes them available online, fully searchable. I’ve found reference to my ancestors in histories such as the History of Delaware County and Ohio or publications like Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine (vol. 28, no. 4), and even entire books about a particular family line, such as Thomas Family of Hilltown, Bucks County, Penn’a. Many of these I found just by typing names into the search box. If the full version isn’t available online you can usually request a copy through Interlibrary Loan.

Libraries

Many old books contain lots of genealogy information, and many of these are available through Interlibrary Loan in the probable event that your local library doesn’t have a copy. You can search multiple libraries across the country simultaneously at WorldCat. I’ve been able to thumb through such rare finds as Knox County, Ohio, will book “D”, 1855-1861 thanks to WorldCat and Interlibrary Loan.

Libraries local to the area you are researching often have special collections relating to those area; the Library of Virginia, for example, has all kinds of good Virginia records, many online.

Library Databases

Many libraries subscribe to paid databases and serves and then give free access to their patrons, often from home. Some useful databases to which libraries near me subscribe include HeritageQuest Online and World Vital Records.

Reciprocal Borrowing Agreements, such as this one at the King County Library System, allow patrons of one library to obtain free library cards from other library systems. You can often apply for your card online and obtain your new library card number electronically or via snail-mail. This gives you full access to all of the online databases that your neighboring library systems subscribe to as well, often without ever needing to visit a branch in person.

Other

And of course there’s FamilySearch.org and their “pilot” site which has images of various birth, death and census original records.

If you do need to access ancestry.com, this can usually be done free of charge through most library branch locations.


59 15 * * 1,2,3,4,5 /usr/bin/streamripper http://128.208.34.80:8002/listen.pls -u 'iTunes/7.7.0' -d /path/to/destination/directory -a atc_`date +\%Y-\%m-\%d` -l 7320 >/dev/null 2>&1


This records All Things Considered from NPR each weekday afternoon, just like you used to record radio onto cassette tapes when you were a kid. If I remember correctly cron didn’t like the output streamripper generates while working, hence the redirect to /dev/null. The % character has some special significance to cron and thus must be escaped in the date sub-command.


32 15,3 * * * cd /path/to/destination/directory && wget --mirror --wait 15 --random-wait --page-requisites --convert-links --no-parent --span-hosts --domains downloads.bfads.net,bfads.net --exclude-domains i.bfads.net,forums.bfads.net,m.bfads.net http://bfads.net/Adscans/


Each November http://bfads.net/ collects leaked circulars of upcoming Black Friday sales. Some of them are later removed after the stored whine, threatain, and complain. This command checks twice daily for new adscans and downloads an extra copy to a safe place.

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA), or 47 U.S.C. 227 Restrictions on use of telephone equipment, lays out what telemarketers may and may not do. While the TCPA does not specifically ban calls to cell phones, 47 U.S.C 227 (b) (1) (A) (iii) does state that

It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States, or any person outside the United States if the recipient is within the United States—to make any call … using any automatic telephone dialing system or an artificial or prerecorded voice … to any telephone number assigned to a … cellular telephone service, … or any service for which the called party is charged for the call.

Requiring an actual person to manually enter each digit of each telephone number increases the cost of soliciting to cell phones such that it generally isn’t worth it. I guess one could ask a telemarketer if they used an autodialer when calling your cell phone–if they have they are probably in violation of the TCPA.

There are a few exceptions, of course, namely if the call:

• is made in behalf of a charity or nonprofit
• is made by debt collectors, debt purchasers, or creditors
• is made by an entity with which you have an “existing business relationship”

Junkbusters helpfully offers this Anti-Telemarketing Script, and the FCC publishes instructions on how to contact them with a complaint (scroll down to “What You Can Do” and “What to Include in Your Complaint”). You can also sue telemarketers in small claims court, and of course there is the FTC’s National Do Not Call Registry, which has a separate complaint process.

For example, let’s say you have tables:

books

+----+-----------------------------------------+-----------+
| id | title                                   | is_unread |
+----+-----------------------------------------+-----------+
|  1 | Ulysses                                 |         1 |
|  2 | The Great Gatsby                        |         0 |
|  3 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man |         1 |
|  4 | Lolita                                  |         1 |
|  5 | Brave New World                         |         0 |
+----+-----------------------------------------+-----------+

tags

+----+------------+
| id | name       |
+----+------------+
|  1 | classic    |
|  2 | fiction    |
|  3 | irish      |
|  4 | dystopia   |
|  5 | literature |
+----+------------+

books_tags

+---------+--------+
| book_id | tag_id |
+---------+--------+
|       1 |      2 |
|       1 |      3 |
|       2 |      2 |
|       2 |      1 |
|       3 |      2 |
|       3 |      3 |
|       4 |      2 |
|       5 |      1 |
|       5 |      2 |
|       5 |      4 |
+---------+--------+

and we want to know how many books there are with each tag in the database. We could say

SELECT t.*, COUNT(bt.book_id) FROM tags t JOIN books_tags bt ON t.id = bt.tag_id GROUP BY t.id;

and get

+----+----------+----------------+
| id | name     | count(book_id) |
+----+----------+----------------+
|  1 | classic  |              2 |
|  2 | fiction  |              5 |
|  3 | irish    |              2 |
|  4 | dystopia |              1 |
+----+----------+----------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

but we’re missing a tag! This is easily solved by using a LEFT JOIN, like so:

SELECT t.*, COUNT(bt.book_id) FROM tags t LEFT JOIN books_tags bt ON t.id = bt.tag_id GROUP BY t.id;

+----+------------+----------------+
| id | name       | count(book_id) |
+----+------------+----------------+
|  1 | classic    |              2 |
|  2 | fiction    |              5 |
|  3 | irish      |              2 |
|  4 | dystopia   |              1 |
|  5 | literature |              0 |
+----+------------+----------------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

But what if you only want to consider books you’ve read? Now we must also join against the books table.
You may be tempted to try

SELECT t.*, COUNT(bt.book_id) FROM tags t LEFT JOIN books_tags bt ON t.id = bt.tag_id LEFT JOIN books b ON b.id = bt.book_id WHERE is_unread = 0 GROUP BY t.id;

but that simply returns

+----+----------+----------------+
| id | name     | count(book_id) |
+----+----------+----------------+
|  1 | classic  |              2 |
|  2 | fiction  |              2 |
|  4 | dystopia |              1 |
+----+----------+----------------+

To return all tags the trick is to move the condition into the join clause and then count what’s returned from the third table. Thus

SELECT t.*, COUNT(b.id) FROM tags t LEFT JOIN books_tags bt ON t.id = bt.tag_id LEFT JOIN books b ON b.id = bt.book_id AND b.is_unread = 0 WHERE 1 GROUP BY t.id;

+----+------------+-------------+
| id | name       | count(b.id) |
+----+------------+-------------+
|  1 | classic    |           2 |
|  2 | fiction    |           2 |
|  3 | irish      |           0 |
|  4 | dystopia   |           1 |
|  5 | literature |           0 |
+----+------------+-------------+

I’ve read two classics, two works of fiction, and one about dystopia. Doesn’t that seem like a lot?

What if we want to go a step further? Let’s add authors:

authors:

+----+---------------------+
| id | name                |
+----+---------------------+
|  1 | James Joyce         |
|  2 | F. Scott Fitzgerald |
|  3 | Vladimir Nabokov    |
|  4 | Aldous Huxley       |
+----+---------------------+

authors_books:

+-----------+---------+
| author_id | book_id |
+-----------+---------+
|         1 |       1 |
|         2 |       2 |
|         1 |       3 |
|         3 |       4 |
|         4 |       5 |
+-----------+---------+

If we want to do a standard inner join against the authors table (we don’t want books without authors, but we still want tags without books) we can do so with:

SELECT t.*, COUNT(b.id) FROM tags t LEFT JOIN books_tags bt ON t.id = bt.tag_id LEFT JOIN (books b, authors_books ab, authors a) ON b.id = bt.book_id AND b.id = ab.book_id AND ab.author_id = a.id AND a.name = ‘F. Scott Fitzgerald’ AND b.is_unread = 0 WHERE 1 GROUP BY t.id;

Lists

• ps-Daily
• wk-Daily
• {a list for each personal and work project (prefixed with ps- and wk- appropriately)}
• ps-Someday
• wk-Someday
• iTunes
• Books
• Lent/Borrowed

Smart Lists

• @Home [tag:na AND location:@Home]
• @Calls [tag:na AND tag:@call]
• @Errands [tag:na and tag:@errand]
• @Web [tag:na AND tag:@web]
• @Work [tag:na AND (location:@work or location:@downtown) AND NOT dueAfter:"2 weeks from today"]
• @Work-MIT [tag:na AND (location:@work or location:@downtown) AND NOT dueAfter:"1 week from today" AND (priority:1 OR priority:2)]
• Wait-Personal (or ps-Wait) [tag:wait AND NOT location:@work)]
• Wait-Work (or wk-Wait) [tag:wait AND (location:@work or location:@downtown)]
• Work-WeeklyStatus [completedWithin:"1 week of today" AND location:@work AND NOT list:ps-Daily]

Tags

• na (next action)
• @web
• @call
• @errand
• {a tag for each person who has been delegated a task from a Wait list}

Locations

• @Home
• @Work
• @Downtown

They’ve imported and done some cleaning on the entire US Census TIGER dataset as well as integrating user-contributed tracks. I downloaded the .osm for my state, ran java -jar mkgmap.jar map.osm, and ended up with a .img better than the ones I used to piece together myself, and in a fraction of the time as well.

OSMs for every state in the union are here or here. Enjoy!

Update: I’ve converted each of the .osm files into Garmin .img format. You can get them (with the exception of California, Texas, and Virginia, which were too large to convert) at http://files.ideaharbor.org/maps/. Just download the .img of your choice, rename it to gmapsupp.img and place it in your Garmin directory on the GPSr, and you should have maps!