When I was in high school I thought it was really cool to collect email addresses. It started with “net@ddress”:http://www.netaddress.com, which, to my knowledge, was one of the first to offer free email. My dad discovered it and quickly signed my whole family up with free accounts.

Shortly thereafter Yahoo! and Hotmail both came out offering their free email services. In the early days most of the free services had the ability to forward to another account, and Yahoo! (I had four or five Yahoo! accounts at one time) gave you the option to download your email through POP3. I remember bragging about having my 15 or 20 different email addresses all forwarded to one of my Yahoo! accounts and routed into my Outlook Express. I shudder to think how I might’ve acted if Gmail had come out when I was that age.

At any rate, my new collection seems to be not email addresses, but websites. I’m not bragging about this collection (or am I?). I certainly haven’t meant to collect this many, but I’ve got about six websites right now.

* joeyday.com
* “joeyday.org”:http://www.joeyday.org
* “geocities.com/joeynday”:http://www.geocities.com/joeynday — used this before my domains
* “cs.utah.edu/~jday”:http://www.cs.utah.edu/~jday — a freebie from the School of Computing
* “eng.utah.edu/~jday”:http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jday — a freebie from the School of Engineering
* “joeyday.blogspot.com”:http://joeyday.blogspot.com — so I can post on other bloggers’ blogs

Now, that’s only counting personal sites. I own a few other domains that I don’t consider “mine” per se:

* “hrwiki.org”:http://www.hrwiki.org — the one, the only
* “fellowsites.org”:http://www.fellowsites.org — a non-profit hosting company
* “janeneday.com”:http://www.janeneday.com — my wife’s website

What got me thinking about all this? Well, I’m hoping to acquire at least one more domain sometime this month. I probably shouldn’t say much more about this right now, but I’m sure you’ll hear more as things develop.

I’m playing with my color scheme today. If you think it looks like puke, wait a few minutes and refresh the page. I should be done sometime this afternoon. Thanks for your patience.

Edit @ 3:06 pm: Done. I was going for a crisp, clean, bright look. What do you think?

Edit @ 10:32 pm: Depending on which computer I load it at, I’m still seeing the old beige colored sidebar. You may need to clear your cache or do a Ctrl + F5 to see the new colors. If the sidebar is white, you’ve got it.

One of my favorite bloggers has “noticed the Homestar Runner Wiki”:http://blogs4god.com/linker/article.php?a=001881. MeanDean (Dean Peters) of “blogs4God.com”:http://www.blogs4god.com and “Heal Your Church Web Site”:http://www.healyourchurchwebsite.com comments:

bq. Ain’t technology grand?! Lookie what I found … the [Homestar Runner Wiki], a collaborative knowledge-base dedicated to the Homestar Runner Flash cartoons created by The Brothers Chaps. We are currently working on 900 articles. COooool!

Speaking of getting noticed… At the family Christmas party last December I ran into a cousin I haven’t seen for several years. He’s into computers like me (although he’s a lot smarter), so the subject naturally turned from computers to Firefox to the Firefox Wikipedia plugin. As we were talking about Wikipedia, I asked him if he’d ever heard of Homestar Runner. I was getting excited to tell him all about the Homestar Runner Wiki, but he beat me to it! He was the first person in real life to bring up the wiki before I did.

It’s fun having a website that gets noticed, though I shouldn’t take even a small percentage of the credit for that. Being a collaborative effort, it owes its success to the many members who’ve contributed hours and hours to make it what it is. It’s still fun to think that I kicked it all off though. In the words of MeanDean: COooool!

Well, the crap’s been hittin’ the fan hard lately. Spammers have taken to a new trick: using trackback pings.

I’ve installed a couple plugins that are supposed to put all trackbacks and pingbacks (I had no idea there was a difference until about 5 minutes ago — remind me to look that up later) into my moderation queue. I get so few (read: zero) real trackbacks that I’m not too worried about making legitimate people wait a few hours.

If you’re interested, you can find the plugins I’m using at “MtDewVirus”:http://mtdewvirus.com/archives/2005/01/06/wordpress-plugins-trackback-and-pingback-moderation/.

Die evil spammers, die!

I come from a background in which I frequently felt misrepresented. There are many LDS teachings that are not understood by the majority of Christians. But as much as Mormons cry out for fair representation of their beliefs, there is at least one Evangelical Christian belief that I see misrepresented by most Mormons who attempt to refute/explain it: the doctrine of the Trinity.

Many Mormons think they understand it, and some actually get close (I count my father and brother-in-law among them). Most have a stack of canned responses with chapter and verse to show that the Trinity is an absurd belief. What they do not realize is that many Evangelicals use the same verses to prove the Trinity.

I was reading a copy of Our Daily Bread yesterday (Feb. 4) at my mother-in-law’s house. I couldn’t help but notice the “insight” box ((For some reason, the insight box isn’t shown in the online version of Our Daily Bread. It only appears in the printed pamphlet version.)) under the daily Bible reading, Matthew 3:13-17.

The baptism of Jesus is one of the passages in the New Testament that validates the doctrine of the Trinity — the three-in-one personhood of God. The Father speaks from heaven, the Spirit descends as a dove, and the Son obeys, perfectly pleasing the Father (vv. 16-17). Even though the word trinity never appears in Scripture, there is ample evidence of this truth, including the Great Commision in Matthew 28:19-20 where Jesus’ followers are commanded to baptize new believers in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Can you find other places in the New Testament where the three persons of the Godhead are mentioned together?

I can’t tell you how many times on my LDS mission I used the story of Jesus’ baptism to refute the Trinity. Here we see an Evangelical writer using those very verses to show that Trinitarianism is consistent with scripture. How does this square with reality? I was hoping you’d ask that.

Over the next few weeks I hope to continue this series with a thorough and proper explanation of the Trinity. I hope it will help a few Mormons understand the doctrine a little more clearly so as to avoid misrepresenting others’ beliefs in the future.

Proceed to part 2 of “The Trinity” →