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encrypt messages to me using PGP/GnuPG with my current public keys (2019 ed25519 ECC key, 2012 4096-bit RSA key), which superseded my historical keys (1998 DSA key, 1994 RSA key).

A quotation

[quotation #47 of collection of 885 · previous · next · another random 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

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.

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

Good causes

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.