Categories
technology

Best-Of Comments

Have you ever wanted to share your favorite comments on the front page of your site? I’m not talking about the most recent comments, or the most frequent contributors, but the best comments (most funny, most thoughtful, most appropriate, most rash – whatever your criteria may be). Now you can.

Best-Of Comments allows anyone with the ability to edit comments to mark a comment as “featured” and then featured comments will be randomly selected and displayed anywhere you choose to place the php call to best_of_comments(). You can select how comments are displayed, how many to display, and how much of a comment to display (if comments are longer than the specified word length they contain a link back to the original comment). In the future you will have the ability to limit how far in the past to look for featured comments.

Latest Version 1.2 (December 15, 2009)

Discovered a function call that allowed other plugins which alter the content to possibly interfere with the display of featured comments.

Categories
politics State

Selective History

Perhaps it’s just me, but if I were Michael Otterson I would find it irksome that the same position I had represented for the church for more than a year was suddenly newsworthy as if something had changed.

It looked like a stunning reversal: the same church that helped defeat gay marriage in California standing with gay-rights activists on an anti-discrimination law in its own backyard.

. . .

The ordinances passed and history was made: It marked the first time the Salt Lake City-based church had supported gay-rights legislation.

More than a year ago – months before the votes started coming in for California’s Proposition 8 the LDS Church stated its official position that they were supportive of the basic rights of all people, including homosexuals, such as probate rights and housing rights. They stated that they were amenable in theory to the Common Ground Initiative but could not take a public position on bills that had not yet been drafted.

The position of the church never changed. Some people claim this is a PR move to blunt the backlash over their role in defeating Prop. 8, but the only thing that changed is that unlike the theoretical five bills of the common ground initiative, the Salt Lake City council actually drafted two bills. The church publicly supported the bills – in keeping with the position they had already taken.

Sadly some people still don’t get it and are suggesting that the church should take a further step by actually writing bill proposals for the state legislature to consider which would extend these same benefits statewide that were just passed within Salt Lake City. The fact is that the church will do just have they have done up to this point – they will not write legislation and they will take no position on theoretical bills that have not been written. When bills are written that are acceptable the church will support them. Bills they can’t quite support will get no comment. In the Utah Legislature they don’t even have to worry about addressing bills that are worthy of their opposition.

Categories
life pictures

Welcome Enoch

Almost 3 years to the day after his older brother arrived we got a new arrival today. Stats and story follow.
Name: Enoch Andrew Miller
Arrived: 11:15 am 11/2/2009
Weight: 7 lbs. 5 oz.
Length: 20 1/2 inches

Enoch Miller
Enoch Miller

We had been expecting him for weeks since his two older siblings each came three weeks early – never again. My new motto is “be ready a month early and don’t plan on anything before the due date.” Enoch was not very late as he was due the last week of October, but he held on long enough to make it into November – boy month in our house since Dad, Isaac, and now Enoch all have November birthdays. Unfortunately siblings (under 14) can’t come to the hospital to visit so we can’t get a great little family picture like we had when Isaac was born. We’ll post the best we can get after Enoch gets home.

Categories
life

New Calling

The vast majority of those reading this probably already knew this, but I was recently called to be the Elder’s Quorum President in my ward. I’ve known for a couple of weeks as I had to have time to identify the rest of the presidency and get them called but I did not want to announce it here before it was official (which happened yesterday but I was slow to sit down to write about it) despite the fact that the chances of anyone within the ward reading this before it became public were extremely slim.

The day I was called was exceptionally exciting for me because I have so much respect for my stake president, President Taylor. To have the opportunity to sit with him and answer questions of worthiness and talk about spiritual things from the ward conference we had just had was thrilling. In the few minutes that we had before Laura joined the interview he learned that Laura had missed the stake conference where he was called as Stake President and President Eyring taught about the principle of gathering as well as missing the ward conference two weeks before our interview where President Taylor told of his experience when he was called and felt impressed that gathering was the message for our stake. When President Taylor learned that he volunteered to come to our house and teach our family personally that afternoon. We had been praying for President Taylor, Bishop Tueller, and the First Presidency and Apostles as a family ever since the ward conference (due to an impression I had felt at that meeting) and the children knew each of the people they were praying for except for President Taylor either because they had met them (Bishop) or through their pictures. They enjoyed meeting him so that they knew who they were praying for and Laura and I felt so much love as he taught us about gathering and actually gave us a copy of the talk he had been giving at ward conferences on the subject. What a great way to start our relationship with him as I will have more dealings with him through this calling than I could expect to have without it.

Anyway, I’m very excited to have this opportunity to serve. I have a great presidency with Wes Austin, Jon Nieman, and Alex Monson. Best of all I have an amazing quorum and get to work with a Bishop and Stake President that I really admire. Ever since I was first called I have begun to have greater feelings of respect and concern for the men in the quorum and I’m happy to be in a position where I will have the information which will enable me to reach out and help them in any way that they need it.

Categories
life

Halloween Tradition

Three years ago I would have told you that Halloween was the dumbest/worst holiday on the calendar. Two years ago I did say that it was tolerable. Last year if I had written about it I would have said that it was a really fun to go chat with our neighbors while the kids got more sugar than we would wish them to have. This year we started what we hope will become a tradition (and hopefully we’ll get it refined so that it works very smoothly for everyone) – we gave out hot chocolate as our Halloween treat. For the sake of helping us to remember the details – and because everybody surely wants to know the details of what we want to do for Halloween each year – I am writing how we made this work this year.

Laura made homemade hot chocolate in the late afternoon and we put it in a crock pot on “warm” sitting on a table just inside the front door. We placed an abundance of small paper cups there and then we went out for out round of trick-or-treating. I’m not sure we got it right this year, but the intent is for us to go early enough in the evening that we can catch the bulk of our neighbors home as we circle our block once – I imagine that over the years the kids will expand their range but for now once around that block in about an hour lets us see and talk to a bunch of people and is about enough for their attention. The hope is that this gets us home in time so that few if any local witches, ghouls, and goblins have come to our door before we return. Then we can see them (again in many cases) as they enjoy our warm offering as the evening gets colder. I can seriously envision having our children going out with friends and ending the evening with a hot chocolate party at our house.