Would you vote for a Pressroom Cyst?
I never paid much attention to closed captioning on TV until I started going to the gym. Since there’s not much else to do while I’m working out I’ve been struck by a couple of things as I watch. First, how much skill it must take to keep up with the talking heads as they blather on about this or that… And second, how funny it can be when the captioner messes up, which is often. Usually it’s just badly butchered spelling, which I struggle constantly to ignore. Today’s closed-captioning gaffe was different. By far the best yet. I hadn’t been paying much attention and I looked up and caught the tail end of something on Hannity & Colmes. Across the screen scrolled the perfectly spelled phrase WHITE PRESSROOM CYST.
Pardon me?
I kept watching. It turns out they were discussing a remark that Barack Obama’s new pastor (or somebody like that) had said about Hillary Clinton. I still didn’t get it… I scanned every word now, transfixed by the conversation, hoping I could piece it together before they went onto something else.
Then I got it… Hillary was being accused of being a WHITE SUPREMACIST!
Funny, but not anywhere near as funny as being a White Pressroom Cyst. I always knew Ms. Clinton had a dark side.
e-Sword LIVE goes, um… Live!
I have a tee shirt that reads “I never finish anyth.” The caption is tongue-in-cheek, but as I often have several projects in the hopper at once it sometimes feels like the truth. e-Sword LIVE is a project that after a long incubation period has finally escaped into the wild.
I’ve had the privilege of working on e-Sword LIVE for about the last eighteen months. It’s a web application version of Rick Meyer’s e-Sword Bible software. The original e-Sword is a standalone Windows program that is by all accounts the most popular Bible study software in the world, with over 7 million downloads worldwide.
Rick wanted to create a version that could be used on the web by anyone and from anywhere. He headed up the project and I built the system from scratch using the MooTools javascript framework and the usual suspects PHP, MySQL and Smarty templates. There’s a wide variety of different Bibles, Commentaries, Dictionaries and other cross reference tools available, all tied together by some nice technology that makes it easy to use and navigate.
You can type in a reference like “John 3:16″ or search for words or phrases. If you want to link to a specific passage from your own site you can do so like this:
http://live.e-sword.net/app/?bibleref=1ki_19:11
Check it out here and let me know what you think.There’s a default Bible and Commentary, but lots more are available once you register.
Soon we’ll have it shortened and you’ll be able to omit the “/app” part of the URL. Oh wait… I guess that means it isn’t finished after all!
The Tennessee Renaissance Festival
I took the family to the Tennessee Renaissance Festival last Sunday and we had a great time. Watching a couple of knights jousting, eating a giant turkey leg and shouting ARRRRGH! at the top of my lungs was just what I needed. More musings coming soon… probably. 
Finally, something to write about :-(
I’ve been so submerged in my work of late that I haven’t had time to do much of anything else. Since updates have been few and far between for the past couple of months, I doubt anybody even noticed that the blog has been down for a few days.
Some cretin decided to hack my server using a publicized Wordpress exploit. Even though they succeeded in messing things up a bit the damage wasn’t too severe. Plus, it was probably time to upgrade Wordpress and renew my commitment to paranoid security policies anyway…
If you’re curious, you can read about the exploit the attackers used here and here.
Winter’s not over yet.. Or is it?
Here’s two pictures taken within an hour of each other. It hasn’t decided whether to be winter or spring around here, so we’re getting both at the same time. Sledding, snowball fights and flowers… A perfect combo for a Saturday in March.