One typo I do all the time is “ot” when I mean “to”. I think this happens because I am frequently typing NT and OT for the Testaments. This used to drive me crazy. I hate lifting my hand from the keyboard to fix this with spell-check so I created a Word macro to fix this on the fly.

Here it is:

Sub FixOT()
‘
‘ FixOT Macro
‘ Macro recorded 1/1/99 by Donald C S Johnson
‘
    Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdWord, Count:=1
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1, Extend:=wdExtend
    Selection.Cut
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
    Selection.Paste
    Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
End Sub

I have this Macro attached to the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl-Shift-O”. It only works when you are one space past the typo… “ot “ (just before the second quote in the example.

And… I find that my fingers sometimes zip along and type “si” for “is” and “eb” for “be” and “yb” for “by” and any number of other dumb typing errors. My little macro gets used a lot.

If only it could fix all my typos… I still have plenty in the big words too!

It’s something like the way I talk. One of my friends used to say, “My tongue gets tangled around my eye-teeth and I can’t see what I’m saying.”

I don’t know if this of any interest to anyone, but it’s Friday and I have been making these typos a lot this week!

A whole world of e-books is available, much of it for no charge. Check out Project Gutenberg for many titles, already formatted for the Kindle.

In addition, I have saved many pdf books, booklets, and articles on my hard-drive over the years, meaning to read them later. My Kindle makes this much easier to accomplish. You can copy your pdf files right over to the Kindle, although you may want to edit the font size for best viewing … or convert that pdf to a Kindle format book. I have discovered several free software packages for performing this task and for managing Kindle content.

• Calibre is a library and conversion program. I think you can convert books from B & N’s Nook format and other e-publishing formats into the Kindle format. (You can also convert from Kindle format to other formats if you use a different sort of reader.) Really an excellent program.
• MobiPocket Creator is a program that converts pdfs into e-publishing format. I have discovered that it may require some formatting and html coding in some books, but it does get you started on the project. This site also offers books for sale, but I would recommend staying away from that portion of the site.
• Sigil is a program that edits html and saves it in epub format. This allows you to customize your file to display how you would like it. Some knowledge of html is required.

There are other programs out there, perhaps some better than these. I’ve found these helpful, but my projects take on a life of their own and often consume a good deal of time.

As for reading, I find the Kindle to be quite handy – I seem to read a little faster with it as well. You do need good lighting, the e-ink technology can be read in sunlight, but no backlighting makes my living room somewhat problematic in the evenings.

I also am using the Kindle for preaching. I write my sermons in my ‘normal’ 8.5 by 5.5 templates and then copy and paste into a special template for the Kindle. I have to boost the font to 25 or 30 points, then print to a pdf, then copy over to the Kindle. But from there, the file reads very well in the pulpit and it means I can get away from my compulsive saving of paper notes.

One of these days,  I’d like to get an iPad for the preaching – it wouldn’t require “pumping up the fonts”, at least from having a look at a friend’s iPad. And it might be way more cool. However, for now, the Kindle is an affordable and very adequate solution.

* An amazing editorial over at CT regarding the Crystal Cathedral bankruptcy – they don’t get everything right, but make this amazing admission:

The lesson is that our attempts to find and exploit a point of cultural contact inevitably end in bankruptcy.

This does not deny the need to talk about the gospel in language and thought forms that a culture understands. In fact, we cannot avoid doing this—we are culturally and linguistically bound, ultimately unable to get out of our own skin and see the world in any other way. But we must repress every fearful thought that suggests that making the gospel relevant and meaningful rests on our shoulders.

* On the subject of music, several articles out about a new study published at McGill University (Montreal) – when a musical piece builds tension, then resolves it, the brain releases dopamine, the ‘pleasure juice’ that is also stimulated by things like food, drugs, and sex.

• Musical pleasure at TheScientist.com

• Emotion and Music at McGill University – links to several pertinent pdfs also.

• Music produces a natural high, McGill study finds at the Montreal Gazette

Some quotes from the Gazette article:

…the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine is released when people listen to their favourite music, be it rock, jazz or classical.

…

"Because it [music] gives us pleasure, we can use it to our advantage to modulate our state of mind."

…

The music that generated dopamine release depended on the listeners’ tastes and preferences.

"All types of music activated the same part of the brain," Zatorre says. "It doesn’t matter if it’s punk, classical, tango or even bagpipes."

Very interesting stuff. I sent the links to Scott Aniol. I wonder what he’ll make of all that.

* Don’t miss the audio files and most of the notes for the Preserving the Truth Conference. I’m reading Mike Riley right now. Very interesting.

* And last, for Bibleworks users, a recent announcement tells us of a partnership between WORDsearch and BW. You can now buy some pretty interesting titles to add on to BW. This could be a welcome gift for someone. (No idea who that could be…)

Well blow me down, I actually like Logos 4. They said they rebuilt it from the ground up. They did! And it shows!

Logos 4 is vastly superior to all previous versions of Logos. I had the Logos 4 engine downloaded on my computer for some months now. I know they released it a while ago. I have always been somewhat unimpressed with the Logos technology, the philosophy behind their interface [downright clunky], the S-L-O-W-N-E-S-S of their search, and (ahem) some of their business practices [i.e., pricing, early release of unfinished products, etc.].

They have received some criticism on that last point still (and it is largely still deserved, as far as I can see), but the new version is really amazing. The searches are much, much, much faster. The interface is much more intuitive, certainly no longer clunky. The Help file often answers my questions! And displays in a nice side window, not covering the whole screen you are trying to figure out.

I like the easy way of saving layouts of your work. You can save your work in any state and go back to exactly where you left off. That is really nice. And I only needed to look in the help file to find the place to “name” my workspace… but maybe I could have figured it out on my own. As I said, the interface is much more intuitive.

I like the way the Library is easy to access and open books, way faster and really better than the old method.

I like the various options on right click menus – very helpful and often quite different, depending on the type of book you are looking at.

There are still some things that I think could be improved. I think the “Home” screen is basically useless. I have disabled most of it… in fact, I would get rid of it altogether if I could. I wish they had published a handy reference to their new URL method of finding locations in books (so I could get my link to TDNT [Kittel] working direct from Bibleworks). I wish they had a ‘quick search’ “address bar” active in each book – it could work like “Find” in most word-processing software, finding the next instance of a particular word or phrase. I wish you could get rid of irrelevant search items and just keep the ones you wanted (then save them to some kind of hypertext link list file).

But these wishes are really minor. I suppose I might be able to come up with some actual complaints after searching for awhile. But I have to say…

I am VERY, VERY VERY IMPRESSED! Logos, you finally got it right.

I still love Bibleworks, though! I use the tools side-by-side, and find them to be a fantastic one-two combination for Bible study.

Oh yeah… about pricing… because of Logos’ market-leader position for library programs, they tend to have very high pricing. I know that comparisons are made with print material, and supposedly it is all favorable and all. But I find most titles sold directly by Logos to be way too pricey. Look at the success of Amazon Kindle. They are selling books way below their print cost as they should. While I recognize that Bible reference works are more expensive in general than general works, and the workman is worthy of his hire, in theory electronic books should be much less costly than print books. Once they are produced, there is no real cost to their publication. The market for digital Bible reference works is somewhat smaller than general works as well, but I bet Logos would sell a lot more books if they made them available less expensively. They would probably come out at least even, if not ahead.

The only thing that I can see that might keep prices so high is the print publishers demands to Logos. They may be insisting on certain pricing in order to maintain the pricing of their print books. They may have a point, but I think they may also be shooting themselves in the foot by insisting on this practice. I believe they would profit from selling more digital books at lower costs than trying to maintain the price of print publications.

However, this complaint has not much to do with the Logos program itself. Logos 4 is well worth your while if you are a student of the Scripture (in conjunction with Bibleworks!).

So says Pr 13.19a. I wonder if we take that out of context, considering the parallel phrase in Pr 13.19b, but…

But I just finished a massive amount of re-coding our Thru the Bible html index project.

Between August of 2005 and April of 2007 we took our church through a marathon chronological Bible reading and preaching project. We read the same passages together, worked through study guides, and preached messages covering the material we were reading each week.

I created Thru the Bible 1.0 with just the Old Testament index. It was kind of clunky looking, basically really really old-fashioned HTML, back eons ago when the web was young (and ugly). This index contained only our written material.

Tonight I finally finished the re-write of the whole project, OT, Intertestamental period, and NT. It looks much better than the earlier effort, although I am not sure it reaches the level of what the geeks call “Web 2.0”. Anyway, it looks a lot better than the first version.

And it contains all the audio files.

I plan to burn these on DVDs, and will make them available to anyone who asks for the cost of postage. (These will be on basic cheap DVDs, if you want a “100 year” DVD, it will cost $5 plus postage.)

I still have to double check all my links, but praise the Lord, all the coding is done.

Now its time to go to bed. How many late nights has this been?

UPDATE: DVDs now available!

My laptop died. Not an agonizing death, but a slow, whimpering, desperate kind of death that allowed me to save my files while the patient suffered on life support on the operating room table. It is not dead beyond repair, but the cost to repair would be about half the cost of a new machine.

So… new machine it is. I now have a Dell XPS 1530 courtesy of Future Shop. It is apparently last year’s model. I was looking at a Dell model that had 4 GB RAM and a 250 GB HD, for $749 (loonies). They had this other machine on the shelf with a price marked down to 849, I think. The sales guy asked if I would be interested if they could get me a good price… it has 3GB RAM and a 250 GB HD… and a fingerprint reader… and a cool slot for the dvd-rw… and originally listed at 1098 loonies. So he got the price down to 649 loonies (40% off!!!) and had a deal.

The machine is very nice.

But it  has vista… need I say more?

Probably not, but I will. I have been working the last two days to get my programs up and running. A few minor glitches, but I think I am basically back in business.

What a nightmare Vista is though! There are some improvements and it is smarter than XP in some ways. But man, do I hate the dumbing down they are constantly doing. They are trying to make PCs more like Macs every time they upgrade. What is the point of that? There is a reason most people don’t have Macs.

I think I finally have come to grips with it and I suppose I will have to get used to it. But it is maddening how difficult it makes it for you to get into the guts of the thing and really tweak it to make it do what you want. I understand the concept of making computers easy for the masses and for marketing purposes, etc, but why do they have to make it tougher for those of us who like to tinker? Why save us from ourselves? Why not let us just crash these things by allowing us to mess with everything?

Well, I have figured out how to get to most of the things I want, but I still don’t like it.

But I won’t upgrade to the new MS Office and its stupid Ribbon for anything. They’ll have to pry the old Office out of my cold dead fingers!

Ok, if you have made it this far, you should win an award for rant endurance!

I can insert a map. Here is a map of our church’s location:

We are at the corner of Brock and Matson above. The map comes as a road map, or in aerial view as below.

In the aerial view, our church building is the black-roofed building just above the green playing fields, with a few gary oaks behind. The oaks are mostly gone now, we have 14 townhouses as our ‘back-door’ neighbours now.

I can also easily insert pictures, hyperlinks, and videos, all without leaving a fairly intelligent WYSIWIG editor. There is an option to insert tags, one which I don’t understand. The tags are somehow related to Technorati, or Flickr, or deli.icio.us and others. These are things I have vaguely heard of but I don’t really know what they mean.

I can format text in quite a few different ways, like this:

Heading One

or

Heading Two

or

Heading Three

or

Heading Four

or

Heading Five

or

Heading Six

I can add colour to text, strikethrough, and other formatting settings.

So far I am quite pleased with this editor. It makes posting so much easier.

I can save these posts as drafts, to work on later, or I can publish directly from this editor to my blog without entering its editing features.

Try it, you might like it…

Regards,
Don Johnson
Jer 33.3