Jon C. Jensen

I live in Provo, Utah and work with Internet-related projects: web applications, databases, scalability, system administration, and security, and in the past, ecommerce and Android app development. I’m a radio amateur (“ham”) with call sign KG7TXN.

I sometimes write on Somusing, the blog of my wife, Erin, and wrote a lot on the End Point blog when I worked there.

My email address is jon@swelter.net — since 1999! You may encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2026 ed448 ECC + Kyber, 2019 ed25519 ECC, 2012 4096-bit RSA), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA, 1994 RSA).

A quotation

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The sexuality of community life, whatever its inevitable vagaries, is centered on marriage, which joins two living souls as closely as, in this world, they can be joined. This joining of two who know, love, and trust one another brings them in the same breath into the freedom of sexual consent and into the fullest earthly realization of the image of God. From their joining, other living souls come into being, and with them great responsibilities that are unending, fearful, and joyful. The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth. It is the fundamental connection without which nothing holds, and trust is its necessity.
Our present sexual conduct, on the other hand, having “liberated” itself from the several trusts of community life, is public, like our present economy. It has forsaken trust, for it rests on the easy giving and breaking of promises. And having forsaken trust, it has predictably become political. In private life, as in public, we are attempting to correct bad character and low motives by law and by litigation. “Losing kindness,” as Lao-tzu said, “they turn to justness.” The superstition of the anger of our current sexual politics, as of other kinds of anger, is that somewhere along the trajectory of any quarrel a tribunal will be reached that will hear all complaints and find for the plaintiff; the verdict will be that the defendant is entirely wrong, the plaintiff entirely right and entirely righteous. This, of course, is not going to happen. And because such “justice” cannot happen, litigation only prolongs itself. The difficulty is that marriage, family life, friendship, neighborhood, and other personal connections do not depend exclusively or even primarily on justice—though, of course, they all must try for it. They depend also on trust, patience, respect, mutual help, forgiveness—in other words, the practice of love, as opposed to the mere feeling of love.
As soon as the parties to a marriage or a friendship begin to require strict justice of each other, then that marriage or friendship begins to be destroyed, for there is no way to adjudicate the competing claims of a personal quarrel. And so these relationships do not dissolve into litigation, really; they dissolve into a feud, an endless exchange of accusations and retributions. If the two parties have not the grace to forgive the inevitable offenses of close connection, the next best thing is separation and silence. But why should separation have come to be the virtually conventional outcome of close relationships in our society? The proper question, perhaps, is not why we have so much divorce, but why we are so unforgiving. The answer, perhaps, is that, though we still recognize the feeling of love, we have forgotten how to practice love when we don’t feel it.

—Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community (1993), pp. 138–140

Travel notes

An interactive map of various churches we visited in north England in 2013, with links to our blog posts and photos about each: Churches in north England, 2013.

Important causes

Work talks

Free software

Once upon a time I created some RPM packages of free software for use on Fedora Linux. The source RPMs may still prove useful for building on a newer version.

Human languages

Writing

Religion

Johann Sebastian Bach composed some of my favorite music. See these freely redistributable Bach sheet music PDFs and the James Kibbie complete Bach organ works recordings. Mutopia collects freely usable music scores. Thanks to those who typeset the music and gave it away!

Liberty

Miscellany

mod.zayda.net is a collection of old Amiga-era music “modules”, including the whole U4ia and F8 collection by Jim Young, mostly created on his Amiga.