Here it is, late Saturday night, and on KBYU television is a rebroadcast of a Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas Concert from 2002. I had to rewind and listen again to Infant Holy, Infant Lowly, a Polish carol the choir sang, arranged by the incomparable Mack Wilberg, who was...

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Surise at 7:24 AM on Friday the 9th of SeptemberOn Friday morning, the 9th of September, the color of light illuminating the blinds and curtains of my home's east-facing windows was so intriguing, that I grabbed my camera and went out on my front lawn to snap a photo or two.

The house in silhouette is one of my neighbors one street over. The mesa on the left side, angled, sloping upward toward the middle, is Shinob Kibe, a small mesa in the adjoining community of Washington, Utah.

What a beautiful place Southern Utah is!

While at the City of St. George's web site, I came across this little gem:Give it a listen. It left me grinning from ear to ear.

What a great place to live! Where besides St. George will you find a city mayor willing to share like this? (Dare I mention that I'm related to Mayor Dan? He's my dad's first cousin, so I guess that means we're first cousins, once removed.)

Thanks, Cousin Mayor! I enjoyed the song and had a good chuckle.

I must admit, I've heard Roene DiFiore's The Dixie Song before, when my mother has sung it.

From Mayor Dan's web page, the lyrics are:Roene DiFiore (if you follow the web link, look down near the lower part of the page) and her Program Bureau at Dixie College had a lasting impact on many people, as my mother has said.

[UPDATE 18 Jan. 2010: None of the links here work any more, sadly. If I ever find a copy of the audio or video, I'll try to host a copy on my server directly. Also, I fixed the spelling of Roene DiFiore's name (I'd had it wrong: "de Fiore")]

[UPDATE 04 Jul. 2020:

First, a CORRECTION: The song is actually a slightly modified version of "Are You from Dixie ('Cause I'm from Dixie Too)" written Jack Yellen (lyrics) and George L. Cobb (music) and originally recorded in 1916 by Billy Murray. (See this Wikipedia article about it.) I always associated it with "Mrs. D" (a.k.a. Roene DiFiore) because that's how I first recall encountering the song. Perhaps "Mrs. D" was responsible for the southwestern Utah modifications to the song.

Though I cannot find the old 2005 recording of former Mayor Dan McArthur singing, I did run across this YouTube video of current Mayor John Pike singing it at the 2019 Utah League of Cities and Towns convention, posted by the Utah League of Cities and Towns (ULCT) YouTube user, which user introduced the video thus:

You want to hear a man with passion along with pipes? Check out Mayor Jon Pike as he sings the St. George song to members of the Utah League of Cities and Towns. How many cities have a song... and if we do, how many of us know it? Kudos to this musical mayor for his community pride!

I did find an Archive.org archived version of the City of St. George page from August of 2005, but unfortunately they did not archive the audio file linked. Here is the archived page.

Snapshot taken 04 July 2020 of Archive.org's August 13, 2005 archived copy of the web page with Mayor Dan's song link.

From that archived page I see that perhaps my mistaken spelling of the name DiFiore as "de Fiore" and my misattribution of the song might to some degree have originated from the information from St. George's 2005 web page.]

The King of Attolia
The ThiefThe Queen of AttoliaGrrr, I don't think I can wait until February of 2006 for Megan Whalen Turner's forthcoming book, The King of Attolia, the third of her Attolia/Eugenities books that include The Thief (a Newbery Honor book), and The Queen of Attolia.

My sister stopped by today and had me surf the web to check out what The King of Attolia's cover was going to look like. All that did was whet my appetite, triggering my impatient desire for the upcoming third book.

Both my sister and I love the cover art, and the matching new cover art for the earlier two books. I especially like the lighting and contrast on the upcoming book's cover.

My sister lamented, however, that the new art was only available for the first two books in the new paperback editions, not in hardcover. I sympathized, agreeing with her fully.

Some of the art on the older editions was less interesting, and in the case of The Queen of Attolia, the cover with the hand above a building, outright ugly.

In the meantime, will I do until February? Ug, I can't wait!

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Another Geek Alert

Looks like I'm geeking out these days. I just implemented my first AJAX mini web application. You can help me test it if I'm online. Just go to this page, and I may be online. Or it may not work at all.

It's a simple multi-user web chat room that uses asynchronous background requests (so it doesn't have to reload a page or use a hidden iframe like my previous web communications stuff used). I need to make it look better (it's ugly looking right now) and get it to work on more browsers.

The PHP and JavaScript source code is available here.

Whee, fun!

Update: Over the following weekend, I improved a few things, including the layout, handling window resizing, etc. It seems to work all right under Firefox and MSIE on Windows, and with Firefox and Safari on the Mac (the versions I have access to, at least), but Opera seems to have a bit of trouble still.

Super Geeky Post Alert! Don't say I didn't warn you! *grin*

In administering FreeBSD servers, in particular using FreeBSD jails to encapsulate various processes and/or services, I've often wished for a ps command to list all processes within a particular jail. Now with FreeBSD 5's useful jls command to list all jails on a host, and also jexec which allows one to attach to an existing jail and execute a command within it, it's as easy as whipping up a quick alias or shell script to get a list of processes within a particular jail.

Here's my solution, a shell script I named jps for ps within a jail. (Of course it requires that the ps command be present within the jail and fully functional.)


#!/bin/sh
JID=$1
ISNUM=`expr "${JID}" : '^[0-9]*$'`
if [ -z "${JID}" -o "x${ISNUM}" = "x0" ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 <jail_ID> [<args_to_ps> ...]"
exit 1
fi
shift
jexec $JID /bin/ps $@


Of course it won't work on FreeBSD 4.x hosts, but...

States I've Visited (as of 09 July 2005)Okay, I ran across this site while reading this 'blog entry and had to create a map of the states I've been to thus far in my life. Kentucky and Illinois are both listed for the few minutes or hours spent at airports there changing planes. An interesting little bit of fun...

I'm listening to one of my new CDs, Jane Monheit's album Taking A Chance On Love.

Actually I'm playing a burned copy of the CD. For some reason the actual CD wouldn't play in my DVD/CD player in my living room. I suspect that my player is just brain-dead. I've had trouble with a few other CDs too. But the burned copy—I ripped the original and burned a copy to use—plays just fine. Odd.

It's nice. She's very good at vocal scatting. Picking the right kind of songs, having a good arrangement, and a having great back-up band sure complement a good singer.

My sister, Katie, would be happy to hear I've got this CD, since she's been an avid Jane Monheit fan for years.

While listening, I got thinking of some of my all-time favorite vocalists. I think my all-time top female vocalist would have to be Ella Fitzgerald. My all-time top male vocalist pick would have to be Nat King Cole. Anything either sings is going to sound good. I'd have to include Frank Sinatra up there among the greats, and Norah Jones too. But Nat and Ella win the top spot, no contest.

At this point in listening to the CD, I'd have to say I mostly prefer the quick, energetic songs. When Jane sings the slower songs, a little Jane goes a long way. Don't get me wrong, she's very good. I like variety, and apparently this evening, I like a little energy.

Jane probably ranks at about the same place as Harry Connick Jr. They're both good, but sometimes I can't make it through an entire CD.

Harry's CD Songs I Heard is an exception to that rule. It's one of my top favorite CDs. I can listen to it again and again. Proving that with such talent, picking the right music, the right arrangements, and a good band or orchestra can make a very good singer sound great.

I did really like the duet with Michael Bublé, I Won't Dance. (He's another favorite vocalist.) And now Love Me Or Leave Me is playing. I like it.

Except even with the burned CD, my stupid player is introducing audio glitches here and there now. Argh! I'm gonna have to get me a new DVD/CD player it looks like!

Oooh, using an acoustic guitar as sole accompaniment for Gershwin's Embraceable You was a good way to provide some contrast. Good choice! Nice. And it's hard to go wrong with a classic Gershwin.

From acoustic guitar to symphonic orchestra for accompaniment for Dancing in the Dark is nice. But I would have broken up the two slower songs with an energetic one in between, though.

Sego lilies were blooming in the mountain meadows atop Kolob in Zion National ParkOn Monday, the 4th of July, about eight miles away from where I was (as the crow flies -- well over 30 miles away by motorized vehicle), just outside of Zion National Park, my friend and co-worker (not cow-orker) Cassidy Larson was hiking and taking pictures. (Check out Cassidy's Photo 'Blog where he posted a few of his photos.)

Unbeknownst, eight miles away from Cassidy and Matt, on Kolob in Zion National Park south of Pocket Mesa near where my maternal grandmother was born, I too was among the Ponderosa pine trees and moutain meadows and taking pictures, as well as...

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What a blow to my pride, my ego. *laugh* I did a Google search, searching for "gifford" as the only search term, just to see what I could see. How awful it was, to see that my web site only finally shows up near the bottom of page six. *smirk*

I shouldn't be surprised. I don't regularly churn out new and interesting material on my site. I don't exchange links with friends. I'm quite a web recluse after a fashion.

The search did reveal another Gifford (no relation that I'm aware of, though if we both traced our genealogy back to the 1600s, perhaps we'd find we were cousins), another blogger, Matthew Gifford who appears to be a tad geekish and interested in technology. Cool! I browsed his blog for a bit, and even visited his Amazon.com wish list. There was some interesting stuff there that could have easily been on my wish list, like C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity or perhaps (if I didn't own the books already), C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia (boxed set).

Mr. Gifford also managed to attend the Gnomedex, which I only heard about today while listening to the latest episode (episode 11) of TWiT (This Week in Tech).

If I'm ever to rise in the ranks of Google's search, I'm going to have to change, and become interesting so that people will link to my web site. *sigh* It's not going to happen, however. I'm too lazy for such an endeavor. I shall have to continue where I'm at, way down the list. Fame is not everything, and in fact isn't that desirable. It's often destructive from my own observations, so why should I bother?

Well I need to stop ruminating and go hold Family Home Evening with my friend Jason. See you later!