You can now browse and read ThoughtPaths.com from all types of mobile devices more comfortably.

Try it and enjoy…

The latest Tweets will be shown in our left sidebar. I should also note that all verses will be quote from the ESV Bible version, which is what I have adopted for this type of reading.

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That would have been most unfortunate, and I am very thankful that the Lord prodded me appropriately.

The plan in question is called Professor Horner’s Bible reading plan. It has a web site and a facebook page if you Google for it.

In a nutshell, it proposes that one read one chapter from each of ten lists of Bible books each day – that is 10 chapters from 10 different books, daily. The ten book lists cover the whole Bible and are chosen by the good professor to reflect various New and Old Testament divisions and areas of importance.

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? But it works!

Each of the lists are different lengths, so over time the juxtaposition of books and chapters read daily changes. The result is a unique contextualization.

Here is the original article.

I made one modification. Acts was on a list by itself, while Romans was grouped with other Epistles. Given the Reformed doctrinal significance of Romans, I moved it to join Acts. This increases the frequency of Romans somewhat.

Here is a speadsheet of my version, which makes it easier to follow the program. Notice that the days have numbers, not dates, so you can start any time.

My opinion after 75 days -> his predication about the effects are both correct and wonderful. It is very profitable.

Try it…

We all agree that this is invaluable if not vital do quality study, preaching and teaching of the Word.

Now the real challenge begins. Retaining a language that you do not actively speak every day means deliberately keeping it up. But how?

Keep Your Greek

Keep Your Greek, Strategies for Busy People by Constantine Campbell was created to address this problem.

This book was not created in the vacuum of the academic study. Each chapter of the book was created through a blog post and associated blog comments (some of which are included in most chapters). I followed this process online and the result is a timely compendium which hits the mark.

The book is clearly writen and addresses each issue concisely. There is lots of (Greek geek) humour and a point of view that those using Greek will appreciate. In short, it does the job in an engaging fashion, which is half the battle.

It is not that this book contains a lot of surprises, since there is little new under the language learning sun. However, it pulls together most of the tips and tricks appropriate to Kione under one roof. This is uniquely useful and encouraging.

The main requirement, as expected, is ongoing, consistent effort. No surprise there, but the encouragement is appropriate.

Along with the expected suggestions (keep your vocabulary up, practice parsing), there are a couple of strategies for retention and increased usability that are not as often suggested:
- skim reading, as you would in English, to practice getting the ‘just’ of the text. This is rarely suggested for this type of language work, especially for the less advanced.
- varying reading speed deliberately.

Lastly, there is a section on recovering your dormant Greek.

Overall, this is a useful, engaging and most of all encouraging look at a problem shared by most serious bible students. It is a welcome addition. Constantine Campbell is to be commended.

I should close by mentioning that Zondervan gave me a copy of this book for review. Irregardless, I would likely have purchased it and my opinions to do consider that.

[cincopa AEHAjVaNxZig]

The complete gallery is available HERE.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KL3mHPmNKRE

1. Cleaning lady or service company
2. Lawn service
3. Snow removal service
4. Financial Adviser

Let’s put it in a scenario… You decide that one of these services is to be farmed out – say, house cleaning. That is, you are too lazy, too busy or too whatever to do it yourself. So, you check around and find what appears to be a suitable person or service org. Most of these arrangements are informal, so you say go ahead and they start.

The first few times are wonderful. If it is a cleaning service, your house is clean and tidy, including places you didn’t think of or didn’t want to think of. You are delighted. You can live in your mother’s standards without effort!

A period of time elapses when this continues and you settle into complacency around the service. It just happens as a given.

Then, slowly, the service starts to decline. This is not startling or extreme, just not up to the same standard here and there. A new lower standard settles in and that is what is permanent, not what you contracted for. If you are busy and not looking at it too closely, you may not notice for a while. The provider is too busy or rushed for everything, corners get cut, etc. It is slow creep…

You are paying the same and have the same service level expectations. So why is this?

It is like they are on trial for a while, but that is not the real service level. You only see the real level once you are in the bag as a customer and you relax.

There is something wrong here! Is the whole point that you should be able to relax with the assurance that the job is being done?

Now, I don’t have an answer other than vigilance and changing provider occasionally (a pain in the rear end). But this phenomena seems so prevalent in service areas that it is a sociological study in the making.

I am also willing to bet that this generalizes more widely, but that would be outside of my direct anecdotal experience to date. You can draw you own conclusions.

However, thanks to a timely user comment, I realized that readability had suffered by having the lines of text in the posts themselves containing too many characters – the average person being able to quickly scan only 60-70 characters without extra movement. Since I usually read the posts in the blog interface word processor, I didn’t notice this right off.

I bit the bullet and reverted to my original desire, on the back burner because it was too much work – widening via a second sidebar on the left rather than just wider textual area. some judicious forum searching turned up someone else with more the solution (there is nothing new under the sun, as usual).

So, there you have it, post readability retained yet screen usage increased!

This also means that more of the sidebar material is visible without excessive scrolling, so more of it may actually be seen.

Lastly, it has always annoyed me that when viewing a single post in old theme the sidebars were not displayed. To me this was shortsighted design, limiting the reader’s navigation options when leaving the page. This has now been remedied.

Now to convert my other blog to this format…

Blogs are somewhat the opposite. Average screen resolution has grown over the last couple of years. Just a short few years ago, the average user was viewing the net on a 640×480 VGA screen. Then we graduated to 1024×768, which lasted quite a while – partially due to the cost of LCD production on one hand, and the physical weight and cost of large glass crts on the other.

This all changed, of course, with the ramping up of LCD production and the corresponding drop in prices.

As this happened, it also became both possible (in cost of technology) and desirable (to support video in movie format) to move from the older 5:4 video format to the 16:9 cinema format screen.

As a non-gaming, non-movie-watching contrarian, I should note that I rue that day… I am writing this on a 24″ 1920×1080 LCD, but I would prefer a 5:4 format 20″ LCD of the same technical capability. Sadly that is not available

All that is to say that screens are bigger, particularly in width. This make of standard blog theme width, which was set for a 640×480 width screen, out dated and almost weird on a large screen.

Since I still liked the old display appearance of our Kubrick based theme, but felt a wider presentation was in order,  a little judicious adjustment of code was in order.

The result is the present wide Kubrick based template, which I found did not exist in any distribution – go figure. It does look a little bit more up to date, but it avoids the more extreme changes that seemed necessary to obtain the same result via another theme.

A classic 1911A 45 Cal with wonderful custom work (Ed brown beaver tail, stainless barrel and hammer, exotic grips, Heine sites, carbon fiber trigger, and full tuning job). Who could resist…