Fair Warning

A long-term feature of my blog has been Halsocan comments, and a company called "JS-Kit" bought Halsocan about a year ago. It turns out they really bought the user base of haloscan and they have apparently set their sites on tormenting us, the users of haloscan, by obscoleting the system.

So here's your fair warning: if you ever said anything in the comments of my blog which you thought was somewhat worth saving, this would be a good time to find those comments and save them in another place.

You can find your comments by going to Google, and typing this into the search field:

+"[my user name]" site:www.haloscan.com/comments/centuri0n

Don't say I didn't warn ya. I have a real fear that when they come and upgrade the comments, we're going to be wailing and gnashing teeth like somebody killed our dog and served him to us as meat loaf.

fair warning

Haloscan is eating comments. I dunno why.

Be sure that if you are posting a mangum opus that you have composed off-line before you hit "send".

The Golden Tables

First of all, let me heap my unadulterated scorn on Office 2007. I used to be productive with Office, and now I spend half my life trying to find things in the “ribbon”. Hey Redmond: thanks for wasting July 2008 for me, you coneheads.

OK – with that off my chest, I have mentioned this before, but I really loathe study bibles. On the one hand, they are way too much for the average person to grasp – I mean, what do I read first? Do I read the notes at the bottom of the page first, or read the page, then the notes? And what are all these little letters in the text – they’re not verse numbers? And is that map inspired or merely helpful?

And on the other hand, a study bible is usually not even enough to get after real study of the actual text. The closest thing to serviceable I have ever encountered in that respect are the billion notes included with the NET Bible – and even those have the problem of not really being consistent in content or intent. If you want scholarly emendations, you ought to go grab a book about your question and get the actual answer and not the headline of the actual answer.

And really, those complaints are actually symptoms of my larger concern here, which is the actual reading of the actual Bible. You know: people have a hard enough time getting past the book of Exodus as it is. When Exodus becomes an archeological conundrum or geographic puzzle or sociological interpretations of cross-cultural baloney, the average guy will give up and go listen to Joel Osteen or something because at least Joel has a wife who’s tough enough to punch a flight attendant when she doesn’t get her way in first class.

I mean: we want people to read God’s word, right? We’re Protestants after all, and if we make the Scripture into something which requires a Scribe or a Pharisee or academic magisterium just to get past the introduction, our man Wycliffe may be rolling in his grave.

So I say all that to say this: at some point, I’m going to post a review of the new evangelical translation of the Golden Tables (also known as the ESV Study Bible), and I come at the job with a pretty obvious and unashamed bias against the genre. I read the “Literary Study Bible” and found it “helpful”, but frankly I wouldn’t hand it to a new Christian. He needs to read the actual book of Hebrews and not the high-falootin’ grad-school spin about genre and style those of us with too much time on our hands might enjoy with a cigar and a glass of brandy.

Stay tuned for that.

Programing notes

Beautiful. It's January, and apparently that's the baptist liturgiucal season for demanding prohibition. Gene Bridges sent me this link to Les Puryear's blog; Les has compiled the summary of links to Peter Lumpkin's blog regarding Pastor Lumpkin's thoughts on a "useful" approach to making sure alcohol is illegal and never passes the lips of a baptist in an SBC church.

Most helpful to those of you who are really up for this is this link to the book from which Pastor Lumpkin has extracted his argument against alcohol -- a book published in 1857, which is an edited version of a series of lectures by the Presbyterian (!) president of Union College in Schenectady, NY. And let me tell you: there was never a time I was happier that Google started putting public domain books on the internet in PDF format than when I came across this little set of essays by Pastors Lumpkin.

And I thought I had a full calendar already. Stay tuned.

Whilst in the winter solstice of blogging...

... I have updated the scripts that render the headlines in Flash 9 for you tech-savvy types, and have declared that I am not going to help out you non-savvy people in order to inflict guilt on myself and cause me to do something about the non-flash css which looks like a typographical dumpster dive.

Let me know if the headlines are rendering at a faster pace, especially on slower systems and older browsers (I'm looking at you, IE6)

in other tech-savvy news, Google analytics has updated its tracking widget, so if you are using it, you might want to replace your legacy code with the real deal so you can take advantage of the much vaunted "future improvements" to GA. I am sure one of those is bending your will to the corporate decrees of the Google-shtag, which will undoubtedly make the world a safer, more orderly place.

Christmas list

Yeah, you are waiting for a long list of stuff from Centu Claus:

• the Darrin Patrick talk
• Kent's subsequent merciless beating
• I just got a preview copy of Driscoll's new book Vintage Jesus

There may be something else you want. This is all I'm going to have time for.

And maybe some 'nog and a cookie.

So you have something to comment on, 'k? I know you don't have anything else to do.

haloscan magic

See: you pay $12 and you gain complete control over your haloscan comment template. And not only does it enable all you crazy people a 10K character limit, I have put a length counter for the input box so now you don't have to wonder whether you're about to get scalped or not.

No -- don't thank me. Link to me.

Oh wait -- the Scripturizer also works if you format your references right, but it doesn't pop up.

One other thing this weekend ...

I have the blog back to showing the last 14 posts to drive you all completely insane while the page loads, but then there's no confusion over whether I removed posts or not. The 15th one drops off.

Pheh. Safari times out when it tries to render 14 headlines, so we're going back to the last 5 or 7 posts on the front page, and you'll have to search archives to get the good stuff that falls of the front page.

A-hem ...

OK -- let's call this the unofficial end of the Hiatus.

I'd like to go on-record to tell Michael Spencer that the day he is willing to finish any conversation publicly which he himself begins -- or enters -- publicly is the day he can start pointing fingers at guys like Justin Taylor for being somehow bad guys. Captain Drama and his sidekicks at BHT are almost as ironic and self-parodying as the EC guys who were trying to tell Phil how vile his Emergent-See posters were.

It's nice to be back.

All or nothing

As a precursor to coming off hiatus, I am updating the blog template. Please make your complaints, comments and questions here.

I consider this version beta version 031. There are some things in the master .css file that I haven't gotten back around to fix, but the rest is about right.

Those without flash, or using IE 6, are going to have complaints. I am not sure I'm going to have sympathy yet.

Fair Warning

If you don't install the current version of Adobe Flash for your browser, you are going to miss all the fun when the template updates in the nexxt 30 days and I come back from hiatus.

No, there will not be any annoying shockwave animations, but you're going to be greatly underwhelmed by what you see on this pages without the ability to load dynamic, very low bandwidth flash content.

If you complain about it after this fair warning, I am going to ignore you.