Ryan Byrd’s Ramblings

[Applause]
Thank you very much, President Hinckley, university trustees, President Samuleson, Congress Cannon,BYU faculty and staff, distinguished quests, families and friends, members of the class of 2007.
[Applause]
Thank for the warm welcome here to Provo Utah, home to one of the finest universities in the United States of America.
[Applause]
I’ve enjoyed my time here today. I was pleased to meet with the First Presidency. I’ve been told it’s an honor to be in the company of this university’s chairman, a distinguished American, a recipient of the Presidential Metal of Freedom, Gordon Hinckley.
[Applause]

Continued…

My cellphone videos of the speech:

• 04-26-07_1707.3g2
• 04-26-07_1710.3g2
• 04-26-07_1711.3g2
• 04-26-07_1712.3g2

On Monday, CNN.com reported that a 1778 painting by the Spanish master Francisco de Goya y Lucientes titled “Children with a Cart” was stolen while being transported from the Toledo, Ohio Museum of Art to the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan. The painting is insured for more than $1 million dollars. A $50,000 reward is offered for information leading to the recovery of the painting.

Two of Goya’s best known paintings are The Nude Maja (La Maja desnuda) and The Clothed Maja (La Maja vestida). Goya painted La Maja Vestida after outrage in Spanish society over the previous Desnuda. Naked art up until that time had been nonsexual, and the desnuda seemed to cross moral lines of the day, consequently, some people were upset. It seems a bit tame by today’s standards.

Warning! As you might imagine, Goya’s painting (the Nude Maja) contains non-pornographic nudity. You might not want to click on the thumbnail if you’re offended by naked art ^*

* Back in 1997, a traveling exhibition of Rodin’s sculptures passed through BYU. Four sculptures containing nudity were pulled from the exhibit, including the famous sculpture, “The Kiss”.

Podcast

Various news sources are reporting on a new campaign by Dove to highlight “inner beauty.” Dove produced a Transformation of a Model Video Clip which shows an average woman being reconstructed (mainly though Photoshop) into a billboard-ready model. It’s worth watching.

Discussion question: what are the social effects of advertisers portraying women in practically unattainable states?

Before and After Makeup

Click for larger images

Source: Yossi Bitton Makeup School

It’s no secret that I think polygamists are Satan’s imps. I’ve blogged about how to destroy polygamy in Utah. I even registered the domain www.endpolygamy.com, but I haven’t got around to putting up a site there yet. Why the hate? I think polygamists suck because they hurt little children. I have no mercy for those who hurt children. Down with them all!

I’m not alone in my distain for the shifty-eyed perverts and their ugly wives. The kingpin of the weirdo cultists down in Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, a Mr Warren Steed Jeffs, has been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list since May. I guess Jeffs violated a few laws when he arranged a marriage between a 16-year-old girl and a married man. Utah sees that as a felony count of rape as an accomplice. Oops!

Some months ago, I went and visited Hildale and I was very impressed at their widespread attempt at tax evasion by not finishing the exteriors of their houses. Nice touch. I guess it doesn’t matter, because all the local law enforcement are part of the inbred, evil clan of sodomites, so no one is going to come a knocking.

So this leader of theirs, Jeffs, has been on the lamb, so to speak; laying low in order to avoid detection. What better way to hide from the feds than to cruise around Las Vegas in a pimped out Cadillac Escalade? Jeffs’ big pimpin’ came to a sudden end when, yesterday, he was pulled over by a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper on I-15 just north of Las Vegas.

Maybe you’re wondering what sort of gear the false prophet was toting around in his sweet ride? Here’s a partial list:

• 27 stacks of $100 bills (totaling $67,500)
• 14 cellular phones (He doesn’t just collect underage wives…)
• two Global Positioning System units (why stop at just one?)
• two female wigs (They bring out his feminine side)
• several knives (most high speed chases end in knife fights)
• several CDs (cruising music)
• three watches (presents for the teenage girls he’s dating)
• three IPods (presents for his teenage wives)
• seven sets of keys (seven sets for seven wives)
• a photograph of Jeffs and his father (who said Jeffs wasn’t sentimental?)

Many of you will likely email me to comment that this blog entry is an uncharacteristic departure from the mirthful into the bellicose. “Why all the fervor?”, you’ll question. I’m not sure, although I think my dependence on microwave TV dinners lately is messing with my brain. Darn Swansons!

Maybe you heard (though likely you didn’t), but yesterday was the first annual Utah Bloggers Conference. It was held at the Larry H. Miller conference center (just off 90th south, by SLCC). I arrived early and claimed my free tee-shirt (picture coming soon).

Basically it was about 180 geeky dudes with 20 or so metrosexual business types crowded around tables staring at a panel of six “blog experts”, none of whom I knew. (Discussion question: how does one become a blog expert?) Pizza and Connect magazines were provided. The panel talked about, um, blogs and stuff.

I guess I’m not part of the exclusive Utah technocracy, because I didn’t know anyone there and yet, strangely enough, they all seemed to know one another. Interesting statistic: 99.999% of the attendees apparently work for Mr. Paul Allen (who made a cameo) .

Then there was me. And then there was this one woman. She made me chuckle. During the open-question-asking part of the conference she asked, “where are all the women bloggers?” That’s when I laughed out loud. In an esprit de l’escalier sort of reply, I think they either 1- had much better things to do, or 2- they were all on myspace.

I’ll admit I had my misgivings about the conference going in. I thought it would be akin to one of those “come and get a free vacation while we high pressure-sell you into purchasing a time-share” scenerios. It wasn’t. Nor was it too long. It was only an hour or so, somewhat informative, and rather entertaining.

You should have been there; particularly all you elusive Utah women bloggers.

So I passed an enjoyable Sunday evening with the Derek’s family– eating, discussing, plotting, gaming. As usual, there was mirth in the air. (Either mirth, or too little oxygen. Both produce the same euphoric effect.)

I spent the bulk of Monday working on my computers. I have configured the following:
CompUSA eMachine. A Windows XP machine, attached to DSL. This machine provides Internet access to the rest of us. Also, it shares a printer. How nice.
A new box, built from Totally Awesome Computer parts. Athlon 2700. My main working machine. Also Windows XP.
A Walmart Lindows PC, for all the Linux fun.
A Windows laptop, which is connected my video quad switcher. Windows 98. PCMCIA ethernet card.
* A retrofitted (from LS Micro parts) PC on the kitchen table, which will control my robot. It has an Internet connection, via a hallway switch, and a joystick. Relatedly, I need to chat with Derek about using DLLs in Visual C++. It’s running Windows 2000 professional.

It was a lesson in frustration, but I finally managed to get most things working — including email. (Yes, I use Outlook Express.)

I lost the serial number from two pieces of my software (though I have the original disks.) A search on the Internet for serial numbers yielded a boatload of hud, if you get my drift. My drift is that those sites didn’t really have the serial numbers, but instead, they had hud: think p0rn, spyware, etc. I did stumble on one site that had the numbers I was looking for, IIRC, that was: www.cerials.net.

So David called to tell me that his original opinion of blogs as esoterica, was in point-of-fact, mistaken. The commoners use them!

Speaking of commoners, now is a good time to review our caste system:

Proletariat –
1. The class of industrial wage earners who, possessing neither capital nor production means, must earn their living by selling their labor.
2. The poorest class of working people.

Bourgeois –
1. A person belonging to the middle class.
2. A person whose attitudes and behavior are marked by conformity to the standards and conventions of the middle class.

Aristocracy/gentry –
1. People of gentle birth, good breeding, or high social position.
2. An upper or ruling class.
3. The class of English landowners ranking just below the nobility.

Mom and Dad spent the extended weekend in the condo in St. George (actually, it’s in Washington City, just outside of St. George.)

Tonight is Jujitsu class. I think I’ve decided to give it a try for a month. Sensai Michael Pease said for $19.95 I could get two lessons plus the gi. I think that signing up for two classes a week is a bit too progressive for me, given my workload, so I will, in all likelihood, instead prepay for a month of weekly lessons. The adventure awaits.

I need to email Kristen in Taiwan.

David, if you are reading this, when you come to visit us, bring my books back that you borrowed!

My buddy, Jared, has a cool content management system (postnuke) here: http://www.betteridge.us/
Postnuke has a ton of modules like blogs, image galleries, games, etc. I’ve installed a copy here. Here is the PostNuke getting started guide. There is another CMS that competes with postnuke, but I can’t remember it offhand…

I changed the bblog template for this bBlog. My was too grey/gray, dont’cha think?

I want to be able to print to my shared windows printer from Linux. I think I’ll need samba for that. I will do more research and get back to you’all.

The University of Utah emailed me. They said that they would post accept/reject on my online account by the end of March. The end of March seems like a long time away.

I will experiment with phpTriad, which installs php/apache/mysql in a windows environment.