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!

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.