Studies in James

I'm continuing to study through the New Testament book of James and write curriculum for use in Sunday School. I've finished through chapter two.

Greek meets a homeschool schedule

I'm teaching my son Greek. Yep, a 7-year old is learning koine Greek. Not that we really much of a choice. If Ann or I knew Spanish or French or German, we'd teach him that. But the only language either of us knows at all is Greek, so that's what he gets. We began studying nouns this week, but I quickly realized Jacen didn't know what subjects, direct objects, and indirect objects are. That's a problem. He can't translate out of Greek into English if he doesn't know where to put the nouns. And that's where homeschooling is once again so cool. I simply went to Ann and asked that she shift his grammar schedule to start working on this. Between the two of us, he'll be translating the nouns in no time. Nice.

CueCard - flash card software

One of the "benefits" of going back to school is taking tests. Most classes at the master's level have just a midterm and a final. To help study for tests that are primarily short-answer, I wrote StudyMatch, which is a poor man's version of using flash cards. Last week a friend of mine pointed out a better piece of software called CueCard. It does everything my software does and then some. I recommend it.

Photos: Stone Mountain

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I added some photos of our trip to Stone Mountain State Park west of here in NC. We went back in August, but I was a bit slow posting the pics.

Earthquake

Ann and I were awoken at 5am this morning by a shaking bed. It startled us, but didn't really terrify us. Nothing was knocked off the walls or broken. It felt like a strong person shook our bed or a train drove by our building. Despite the fact that we've never felt an earthquake before, we knew that's what it was. The USGS agrees:

USGS details
USGS map

Teaching the book of James

I've been writing my own Sunday school material as I teach the book of James. I'm creating both a teacher's guide (the content to be taught) and a student's guide (preparation for interested students). I've finished the first chapter. You can either click on Bible in the menu above or click here.

How People Change

"How People Change" by Timothy Lane and Paul David Tripp is an excellent book that every Christian should read. It describes the biblical process of change (sanctification) in such a way that everyone can understand God's plan. It reveals that God is not satisfied with merely changing behavior, but he wants to change our heart as well. It is especially good at looking at how people change during the difficult situations in life.

Paper airplanes

Need to know how to build a paper airplane? Try this site. Lots of designs with written and video instructions.

Water

They say you don't miss something until it's gone. I think we've experienced that this weekend. The water main in front of our condo sprung a leak, which forced the city to turn off all the water to our building until it's fixed. You don't realize all the things you use water for until you have none: washing dishes, putting in contacts, cleaning the table, doing the laundry, taking a shower, brushing teeth, making mac-n-cheese, brewing coffee, rinsing hands after peeling a peach, and on and on. Hopefully they'll get it fixed soon.

Photo: Whistling

Last week Emmy figured out how to whistle. Needless to say, she goes about the house all day whistling. Even better, no doubt, is the fact that her older brother can't whistle right now--he's still missing his two front teeth.

Photos: Overlooking the Mississippi River

On our drive back from TX to NC, we stopped at the Mississippi Welcome Center on I-20. Overlooking the river was a cannon, or more accurately a 42-pound rifled gun from Civil War times (according to the nearby sign). For our kids, the more accurate word is "climbing apparatus."

Photos: Playground in TX

Kathy (Ann's sister-in-law) took the kids to an indoor playground in Longview, TX. They had converted an old grocery store into a huge version of one of those playgrounds you find at Chik-fil-A or MacDonalds. They had a blast swinging and climbing and running around.

The Swedish Chef

Remember the Swedish Chef on the Muppets? Someone has uploaded a bunch of videos of the Chef to Google.

Dell gone nuts

Tuesday morning I was working on a briefing on D. A. Carson's book "Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church," an excellent evaluation of this doctrinally-deficient movement. Just after lunch, my Inspiron 5100 laptop got a blue screen of death. I attempted to reboot, but Windows couldn't find my hard drive. Even more telling, I was hearing unexpected clicking noises from my hard drive. This is always a really bad sign. I ran the built-in Dell diagnostics, and sure enough it said my hard drive was dead.

We know that it's never a matter of *if* your computer will fail, but *when.* Did I have a backup system? Yes! I use Second Copy to backup our files between our various computers. It's set to make an identical copy every two hours. Did it work? Yes! I only lost about 45 minutes of work, which I was able to reproduce. This $30 utility is worth every penny, especially if you have two computers in your house. Still, I'm thinking about buying a NAS, if I can find an inexpensive wireless one.

Then the fun began. A new hard drive was only $60 from Dell, which isn't too bad considering that this is an older computer. The site said that the drives usually ship in 3 to 5 weeks. That's longer than I would like, but it was acceptable since I have other computers that I can use. So I placed the order. Then we got the confirmation, which said the expected shipping date was 4 Dec 06! Yikes! That's not 3 to 5 weeks, that's 3 to 5 months! I googled around for a bit, but I couldn't find anyone else who sold the older hard drive that I needed, so I resigned myself to being without that laptop for a while. It wasn't that big of a deal, since I have a newer Inspiron 9300 laptop that Calvary gave me last year. I began installing all the software I need on it (stuff like Outlook and GAIM). This morning we got another email from Dell: the hard drive has already shipped. Sigh. How do they go from such extremes? I guess their ability to estimate has just gone nuts.

Photos: Beirut

We have recently returned from a trip to Beirut, leaving just before things got really "interesting." Look at our photos and read our journal.