Jon Jensen

I live in Provo, Utah and work at End Point Dev on various Internet-related projects: web applications, databases, e-commerce, scalability, system administration, and security, and occasionally, Android app development. I’m a radio amateur (“ham”) with call sign KG7TXN.

I write on the End Point blog and Somusing, blog of my wife, Erin.

Other places to find me on the web: Twitter Facebook Instagram LinkedIn End Point

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encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2019 ed25519 ECC key, 2012 4096-bit RSA key), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA key, 1994 RSA key).

A quotation

The role of theatre, as I understand it and as I have tried to practice it, is not to make people’s lives easier by presenting positive heroes into which they can project all their hopes, and then sending them home with the feeling that these heroes will take care of things for them. To my mind, that would be doing the lion’s share of the work. I’ve already talked about how each of us must find real, fundamental hope within himself. You can’t delegate that to anyone else.
        My ambition is not to soothe the viewer with a merciful lie or cheer him up with a false offer to sort things out for him. I wouldn’t be helping him very much if I did. I’m trying to do something else: to propel him, in the most drastic possible way, into the depths of a question he should not, and cannot, avoid asking; to stick his nose into his own misery, into my misery, into our common misery, by way of reminding him that the time has come to do something about it. The only ways out, the only solutions, the only hopes that are worth anything are the ones we discover ourselves, within ourselves, and for ourselves. Perhaps with God’s help. But theatre does not mediate that kind of help; it is not a church. Theatre ought to be—with God’s help—theatre. And one way of helping people is by reminding them that the time is getting late, that the situation is grave, that it can’t be ignored. Seeing the outlines of horror induces the will to face up to it. … Face to face with a distillation of evil, man might well recognize what is good. By showing good on the stage, we ultimately rob him of the possibility of making such a recognition himself—as his own existential act.

—Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace (1990), p. 199

quotation #47 of collection of 823 · another random quotation

Travel notes

A map of the route my son & I took on our 2019 trip to Armenia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova: Jon and Seth itinerary in June 2019.

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.

Free software

I support free software and open source. Don’t be a sharecropper! I am on GitHub as jonjensen and have contributed to projects including PostgreSQL, Interchange, DevCamps, and Bucardo. I also keep old miscellaneous scripts around.

Other free software I work most often with: awesome, alacritty, kitty, tmux, Screen, zsh, bash, Firefox, Chromium, Vim, Git, Rust, Go, Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, PostgreSQL, Linux (mostly Red Hat/CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian), Android, OpenBSD, OpenSSH, Apache httpd, nginx, Postfix, Dovecot, Pine (now Alpine), Signal, GnuPG, Standard Notes, Zulip, MediaWiki, VLC, rsync, ripgrep, mtr, and Nmap, just as a sampling. Thanks to all free software developers for your time and efforts!

Human languages

Some Unicode things I keep handy:

Language family maps for reference:

My novice linguistics research: I wrote a paper for Linguistics 490 (senior seminar) taught by John Robertson, winter semester 1998 at Brigham Young University. It examines how Hebrew verb patterns (binyanim) may be semantically grouped using C.S. Peirce’s universal categories. The paper: Hebrew Verb Pattern Tendencies Clarified by Peirce’s Universal Categories (8.5″ x 11″). Reference chart: Roots in various binyanim chart (11″ x 17″).

Writing

Some of my free verse:

Many years ago, a tree fell on our car, so I wrote up the story to share.

Good causes

A few organizations I support:

Religion

Links about 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!

Hymns:

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.

End communication.