I have decided to split blogs and move my biblical studies related work to a new site, ArchaicChristianity.com. The blog is now basically functional and I have some book reviews up. I will continue to blog technical and personal thoughts here on this blog. When my biblical studies work crosses into the world of technology, you will probably see posts in both locations. If there is anything particularly important, I may crosspost that as well. But, in general, I think it is time for me to split my work.

If you have any questions, thoughts, or suggestions, please drop me a note.

This weekend I read an interesting book. Here's the summary from my book review:

Dungan has written a very interesting book in his Constantine's Bible: Politics and the Making of the New Testament. The point of the book can be summarized as follows: the idea of a canon comes from the Greeks, the early church used these ideas and came to a rough consensus, then Constantine jumped in and squashed all innovation and/or ability for the church to discuss this intelligently without fear of getting killed by said emperor. Now for a little more detail.

Read more...

James, you're a horrible influence on my checkbook. I read your post on Eisenbraun's Akkadian mug and couldn't resist. Oh, I did for a while. I held out. Frugal-Eric told me "But you don't even know Akkadian yet! And you don't REALLY need to learn it." But the Not-So-Frugal-Eric said "You've already bought that Akkadian grammar. Sure you haven't started learning the language yet, but if you do, you'll have a coffee mug to help. And it's cool in that really geeky way that everything you do is geeky." The battle was fierce, but eventually Not-So-Frugal-Eric won and I bought the mug. I hang my head in shame...

But now I am over it. The mug is actually quite nice. I picked up a mug with Greek on it at SBL a few years ago, so this brings my total ancient language mug collection count up to two. But this mug is much better than the other one, which is plastic and of low quality. But not this one. It has a comfortable handle, is a good size, and made of quality stuff. I dig it...

The text of the mug is the first bit of the Enuma Elish. You can find the text of the Enuma Elish here. The Enuma Elish is an ancient babylonian story of the creation of the world. For more information, check out the article on Wikipedia.

If you find yourself insanely jealous of my purchase, you can get your own Akkadian mug here. The purchasing experience was pretty good. The delivery was exceptional. I paid for basic shipping and got it first class. Showed up the day after I got the email saying it was shipped! Thanks, Eisenbrauns!

I have a new review up of a book that I found to be quite good. You can find a review of Eat Drink and Be Healthy here. Want to learn more about eating well, with positive information on what you should be eating that people may not be telling you as well as information on bunk that is being handed out as truth? In my opinion, this book is worth your time.

Some of my very nice readers pointed out some issues in my rss feed. I've worked through some of those issues. First, my guids were messed up. Second, posts for my rss feed weren't showing up in Google reader. I re-downloaded RSS Bandit and they weren't showing up there either. They were in Sharpreader, the feedreader I use, so I didn't notice. Anyway, that's now fixed.

Also, I updated my reading list. Making progress on those books. Four for the month so far. Will this be my biggest reading month of the year? Given the pain caused by the Great Fall of 2007, and the time I now spend on my rump, this seems likely.

That's sorta what I said the other night when I fell off a ladder (while painting) and cracked the bone in my right heel.

So now I'm on crutches. Most of the pain is gone, unless I try to stand with any weight whatsoever on my right leg. I don't. I also now own my very own pair of crutches. This is the first bone I have ever broken/cracked (that I know of...longer story). How are you guys doing? Broken any bones lately?

Two nice things have come out of this, however. First, there are all sorts of chores I don't have to deal with at the moment. Whoopee! Second, and more seriously, I've gotten quite a bit of reading done in the last few days. Reading is the only thing that this bone crack hasn't affected negatively so far.

I finished two books. First was Steven Krug's Don't Make Me Think. I liked it a lot. It gave me some really good ideas for, at the very least, improving this blog. I highly recommend it. The second was Goldsberry's The Writer's Book of Wisdom: 101 Rules for Mastering Your Craft. I enjoyed it and it seemed to have some good advice. I think this book is more directled at novelists than others, but to a very novice writer a lot of the advice made sense. If you've got a few extra bucks, go ahead and pick it up. It is pretty cheap and is a very fast read.

I bought a new book this last Friday called Lucifer's Hammer. I'm 437 pages out of 494 done. Great book so far. It is a fiction book, so if you need some fiction, pick it up. I got it for $10 at Half Price Books. Thanks for the recommendation, Edward!

I bet you red that titel and thought I couldn't spel...

This is for all of you that meet at least one of the following three criteria: First, you find great value in the pictures of me in weird shirts, reviews, and the occassional posting I do on the blog. Second, you have some money to spare. Third, you are related and like to give gifts to your relatives.

Eisenbrauns has Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon on sale for $245. Normally it is around $350. Buy me that and you'll be my favorite person. Seriously.

I an a little behind on my book reviews, but I have three more up now. For my web developer readers there is Web Standards Creativity and The Principles of Beautiful Web Design. I liked one but not the other. How will you know? I guess you have to read my reviews to find out.

The other is for the Greek geeks out there. If you are well into the intermediate stage of your Greek or later, you might be able to get some good information out of Michael Palmer's Levels of Constituent Structure in New Testament Greek. 

So I took the day off. Since I have Monday off as well, this is going to make for a long weekend. Yay!

One of the many things I want to accomplish is to get some reading done. One of those items is to finish Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I just finished. What a strange but interestings story that ended up being. If you've got the time, it's a nice little piece of fiction. 

So what else have I been doing? Well, I've been reading some books, one on Greek constituent structure, and one on web design. Reviews coming soon.

Also, I just released alpha 3 of Thrius, but only to a few people. There is still quite a bit to do still. Will have some screenshots up when it is a little more fully baked.

So in junior high I had a horrible art teacher. I remember one day where she lambasted a drawing I had done. It hurt. I haven't really done a lot of art related stuff since. Well, a couple weeks back I picked up drawing again. At some point I'm going to move on to painting, but for now, drawing is enough. So far I'm pretty happy with a reproduction of a bust of Plato and a few drawings of the Tick :). Maybe I'll post some photos at some point. I need more ways of driving traffic away ;)

Have you used Quizlet? I just started using it yesterday. It's a nice replacement for flash cards. I've been a big user of flash cards in the past for vocabulary especially (who knows how many flashcards I made for Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic). Now I'm trying an online solution. It has the expected flashcard functionality as well as some nice quizzing features. The user interface is pretty responsive as well. You can definitely see where he got all ajaxy. If you're a flash card user, this seems like a pretty good site. And it's free.

As promised several weeks ago, I now have a short review up on Adam Nathan's Windows Presentation Foundation book.

Two other books I've spent some time in but won't review are Return of the King by Tolkein and For One More Day by Mitch Albom. The former was fantastic. I think I like Two Towers better, but the whole trilogy was great. As for the latter, it took me about four chapters to get bored. Oh well. They're not all interesting.

Sometimes you just get really busy. A task I'm on has taken up quite a bit of my time and has beaten down my spirits for the last few weeks. It's really mostly the latter. In every project I've seen there is good code, mediocre code, bad code, and really horrible code. I've spent the last few weeks in some of that really horrible code. It's the kind of code that makes you wonder what drugs they were on when they wrote it. It's the kind of code that makes you want to change careers. It's the kind of code that makes you wonder if Scott Guthrie would have heart attack if he ever saw it.

But it is mostly over now. My spirit is recovering, and I can get back to reading, blogging and side projects.

On that note, I updated my reading list. So I have gotten some reading done...

Last week the guest on DotNetRocks was Steve McConnell, author of Code Complete. I had read about 2/3 of the first edition and liked it, so I wanted to get the new edition and read it. My team lead was nice enough to buy it for me and expense it, so I am reading it now. Here's a thought that is often so true. Many businesses Every business I've worked at since my foray into full-time software development could learn from this:

"In many projects, the only documentation available to programmers is the code itself. Requirements specifications and design documents can go out of date, but the source code is always up to date. Consequently, it's imperative that the source code be of the highest possible quality."

Alas, will the world ever learn? Surely some of you have been somewhere that doesn't have this problem :) 

theWPFblog had some good things to say about a book that I just finished reading. I pretty much concur. I'll have my own review on it up soon.

I finished the last books of January a few days ago. First was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Two Towers. As virtually everyone knows, it seems, that is a great book. The other I finished was another superb book, though not as many know it. Richard Hays' Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul is an excellent treatment of, you guessed it, how Paul uses the Hebrew Scriptures. See the review here, if you are interested.

Though I read both of these a while ago, I also posted a review of Linear B and Related Scripts and of John Stewart's America (The Book).

I finished a few more books. First was Wittgenstein's On Certainty (read review). Second was Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring. So, I updated my reading list. A also added a review for Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

I do think the questions of epistemology that Hume, Wittgenstein et al. cover are very important. But at the same time I can't get beyond a feeling of the uselessness of a highly skeptical epistemology. I cannot argue with much of what Hume says, for example, but despite its correctness much of it does not ring true to human experience. You can say all you want that our sensory perceptions are not as reliable as we actually think they are in observing and parsing reality, but you will not abandon sensory perception or its input. I still plan on digging in this area. I still need to read Kant (I have read a little, but not nearly enough). I imagine my feeling will grow even stronger, but it is good material to be familiar with given my many crazy interests.

I added a couple new pages to the site. At the advice of a friend I am now keeping a running list of everything I read. It can be found here.

Also, a credits page for the images and code I use on the site that do not originate from my own work. It can be found here.

I also added a link to my aStore. I like the idea of the aStore, but navigation is horrible. Not sure what I can do about that other than write my own :)

I am always happy to get new books. For Christmas I have received four:

Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul

The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament

The Problem With Evangelical Theology: Testing the Exegetical Foundations of Calvinism, Dispensationalism, And Wesleyanism

The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

I am continuing my reading of Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and will hopefully finish it soon. I also bought and read The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward - A New Approach. I should be posting a review relatively soon.

Ah yes...you can't beat an increase in the book collection.