Let me start off by commenting on Sara’s creative abilities. She is extremely fantastic. She made our wedding invitations on a super tight budget, and I think she did a wonderful job.

What do you think?

Ben and Sara's Wedding Invitations

Just wanted to post another image…This is one of my favorites:

Ben, Sara, and Caleb

I’m such a happy guy!

I just wanted to share this photo with everyone who may not have seen it on my facebook account. I love it!

During this past weekend I made the great decision to ask Sara to marry me. She accepted! So for those of you who have heard roumors of me being engaged they are true. Sara and I have been talking and getting to know each other for a few months now and although we know that neither of us are perfect, we believe that we are perfect for each other. We are SO happy!

Here are some pictures a know some of you would like to see. I’m sorry the quality isn’t great. It’s hard to take a picture of an engagement ring.

Hello faithful readers! I must begin by apologizing that I have not posted in quite a long while and give an explanation. First of all I have started a technical blog that will be seperate from this blog so that those interested in technical things can just read that, and those interested in my life won’t be bothered by tedious technical posts. That blog can be found here.

The next reason for my absence from my blog has been my beautiful, smart, and talented girlfriend Sara. She is amazing and challenges me in many new ways. I love being around her and spend a lot of time concentrating on her. Some other less important aspects of my life are bound to suffer slightly.

This is a picture of Sara and me on our first date.

A question that I get asked a lot when I go to fix someones computer is: “Whats the best way to back up my data.” This usually isn’t a question that is asked when everything is working fine, but when something breaks one begins to worry about data loss. No one wants to lose their work!

Mozy is a Utah based company that has a great solution to that problem. They offer accounts for free for under 2 GB of data. If you need more it’s a small $4.95 per month for UNLIMITED amount of space. Maybe this sounds like a comercial, but it seriously will save you a huge head ache if anything ever happens to your machine…and things usually do happen to machines.

Why else would you want to be a customer of Mozy? They give back to the community. This summer Mozy was one of the main sponsors for the Utah Open Source Conference. I love everything Open Source so the fact that Mozy would chip in makes them an awesome choice in my book.

In short, get some assurity, Get Mozy!

Why is it that war is always a huge part of a political struggle for power? Countless times throughout history war goes hand-in-hand with politics.

As the 2008 election draws nearer once again on the political plate of the candidates is the topic of war. War is a terrible, and horrible thing that is the cause of too much death and destruction. It has been said time and time again that other countries hate America for our “blood thirsty” attitudes, and I see that we do take offensive when needed. Like the brutal police of the world we throw our resources into everything that “needs our attention”

Anti-war activists say “These people we are killing are just like you.” I tend to agree, we are all people and similar in more ways than we are different. We all have the same needs, but maybe Anti-war people are going about it all wrong…

Consider the audience, a Nation of people on anti-depressents trying to fullfil their petty jobs and complete all of their “responsibilities”. A majority of these people walk around day in and day out with psychological issues that haven’t been resolved, and deep down may hate themselves. I think the lyric by Rise Against put it best when they said “These lives we live test negative for happiness.”

So….maybe the new anti-war slogan should be something more along the lines, “These people are nothing like you!”

Lately I’ve been very impressed with Novell and the things they have done for the local open source community here in Utah. I think it’s pretty awesome that a company as big as Novell would take an interest in the work and needs of those who might just be working out of their own garage.

This years Utah Open Source Conference was a great success. If you missed it I would highly recommend not missing next year as the conference seems to grow every year (Or at least it has since it started).

Novell really come through for those who attended by providing laptop bags for carrying around all of our schwag. These weren’t the cheapo bags you would expect from a conference either, they were really nice and I’m impressed that they would do that.

In short I’d like to give a Kudos to Novell for really going all out.

Anyone and everyone following my blog I’ve modified/updated my blog page so that it is easier to use. You may notice that I now have a section for my links on Social Network sites. If you happen to use any of those make sure to add me. If you are not using any of those sites, you should it’s really fun!

Also…feel free to check out my Tumbr site because it gets updated a lot more than this blog, since its not really a blog.

I guess I should have expected it, since it was my first presentation, but I really blew it. Note to self, when creating a presentation leave the details out. My presentation was supposed to be on the future of  Artificial Intelligence but I got caught up in current artificial intelligence. On member of the audience actually raised his hand to ask me what I was talking about….