October 12, 2006 J. Max Wilson

Video: LDS Stakes of Zion 1847 – 2004

In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, individual congregations are referred to as “wards.” Wards, in turn, are organized into groups called Stakes that are roughly equivalent to a Catholic diocese. The name Stake refers to the imagery used by Isaiah in reference to Zion, or the Kingdom of God, comparing it to a tent that is supported and fixed to the ground by stakes.

Watch this interesting 3 minute video that shows the growth of LDS Stakes throughout the world from the year 1847 through 2004. The video moves quickly through each year displaying a flash of light on the world map as each stake is established and then leaves a tiny red dot at the location. The presentation is set to the LDS hymn “The Spirit of God.”

See it embeded here on the blog, or on Google Video .

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October 3, 2006 J. Max Wilson

MP3s of LDS General Conference 2006

If you missed a talk or two, or even a whole session of the Semi-Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints this past weekend, each public session is available for download in mp3 format from KSL . They also offer a podcast that you can subscribe to with iTunes or a similar program.

The mp3s for a session usually become available within an hour or two of the end of the session, but this year they had some technical difficulties and they are only becoming available now.

If you weren’t able to listen during the broadcast, or if you would like to review a certain talk, you can download and listen to the whole thing at your own convenience.

I will update this post to link directly to the mp3 files as they become available:

Saturday Morning Session

Saturday Afternoon Session

Sunday Morning Session

Sunday Afternoon Session

The mp3s of last April’s Conference are available here

UPDATE: mp3s of each session as well as mp3s of each individual talk in the conference are now available from the church’s official website. They are available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese . I have changed the links above to point to these urls instead of KSL.

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September 29, 2006 J. Max Wilson

Vacationing at Home: Fun Things to Do in Utah

Well, I’ve been on vacation all week…sort of. We had planned to go up to Yellowstone National Park, but we canceled at the last minute because of a sciatic nerve problem that would have made the drive miserable for my wife. So I’ve been vacationing at home instead.

It is far too easy to putter away a vacation at home without actually doing anything substantial. You watch videos, surf the web, eat, neglect the laundry, sleep in, and before you know it you have wasted away the entire vacation.

While we have certainly done a deal of that, we decided to use this home vacation to do some fun things that we don’t usually have time for. The weather this week has been perfect so we have been out and about.

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September 14, 2006 J. Max Wilson

Hacking Electronic Voting Machines

In the Republican Primary elections back in June, I had my first experience voting using Utah County’s new electronic voting machines. The process itself was smooth and voting using the machines was easy to understand and even pleasant.

However, my experience as a computer programmer has taught me a healthy distrust of technology and of people using technology.

Implementing proper security in any system takes an exceptional amount of effort, and even then, hackers are unbelievably resourceful and will often find ways to infiltrate the system despite a well implemented security process. What a lot of people unfamiliar with the topic don’t realize is that hackers excel at not only software engineering, but at what we call Social Engineering, or manipulating people using their expectations of technology.

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