This has nothing, I repeat nothing to do with the fact that I just sent off my first PhD application. Nothing.

HT iwestminster via Circlereader, on Twitter.

For those interested, there will be an informal biblioblogger/biblio-tweeter get-together on Friday at SBL. We’re going to sightsee a bit and get some lunch. If you’d like to join us, meet at the Conference registration desk at 10:30. Jeremy Thompson, a New Orleans native, has kindly agreed to plan a couple of hours for us; see his post here.

If you have any questions or would like to attend (or if you cannot attend but would like to meet some other time over the weekend), you can email me (see About page), send me a DM over Twitter, or leave a comment.

Please note that this is not meant to replace the “SBL Tweetup” that has been discussed for Sunday or Monday; it’s just an additional opportunity to catch up.

I’m wondering how many bibliobloggers (and/or bibliotweeters) are planning to be in New Orleans on Friday (I get in late Thursday night), and whether those who are would like to plan an informal get-together. Perhaps we might grab lunch and see a little of the city before the conference starts.

If you’re interested, please leave a comment, drop me an email (see my About page) or send me a DM over twitter.

Image from Flickr by Mandyxclear.

Sorry posting has been slow lately (oh, you didn’t even notice?). Not only have I been trying not to go crazy with stress over PhD applications, working on my SBL paper, and trying to fit in a few minutes to edit my thesis, but I’ve been having unending computer problems.

Two months ago the battery on my laptop (which I use almost exclusively) was running down, so I replaced it, only to discover that the reason it was running down was because of a faulty power cord, which finally kicked the bucket a couple weeks later. So while I waited for the new power cord to come, I dug out my old laptop (ca. 2000), and used it for a few days. I disabled the internet and deleted everything except Word and iTunes, and actually enjoyed working with so few distractions. I was getting a lot of good work done, thinking I might just keep using this one for word processing long term.

And then the harddrive died. Totally and completely dead. I even bought an enclosure to see if I could retrieve any of the data off it, and it just made grinding sounds when I turned it on. So I lose everything I’d done that week, and go back to my usual laptop. It works fine for a month or so, except that it seems to be getting slower and slower all the time. And then two weeks ago the harddrive in that computer fails. It has some sort of catastrophic read error; once again I couldn’t even retrieve any data off it with an enclosure. Luckily I had a full back up from a few months ago, and current backups of all my most important files (like my thesis), but I had to reformat and reinstall everything.

So yesterday, I’m feeling like I finally have  everything back pretty much the way it was… when it suddenly the screen goes black. After a few minutes trying to wake it back up I restart, and after loading the BIOS it goes black again. Windows doesn’t load (it doesn’t even try to load); I can’t even boot from a CD.  This time I think it may be the motherboard, as I put the harddrive back in the enclosure and it works fine, but the computer is completely dead. Lovely.

So I guess I get to buy a new laptop, which I really don’t have the time or money for right now. My wife thinks I ought to wait for the after Thanksgiving sales, but I’m not sure I want to be without a computer for SBL, so I’m looking for advice. I haven’t bought a computer since 2006, and I’m still running XP, so I’m not really sure what I need at this stage in terms of RAM and processor speed. I mostly just use it for research and webbrowsing (I gave up video games a couple years ago), but I do a lot of multitasking and most of my TV viewing is through Hulu.  I stopped by the local electronics dealer and tried their display models out, but without access to the internet or any CPU-intensive programs to try on those things you really can’t tell how a computer is going to perform in the real world.

So what do my tech-savvy readers think? How much RAM and processor power are really necessary to run Windows 7 smoothly when multitasking? Any brands or models of PC laptop that you would recommend? Any that have given you headaches (I’ve had enough of those!)? I’d like to spend $800 or less, but I don’t want a piece of junk either.

Brilliant (HT Roger Ebert):

Update: Apparently YouTube took the video down for “terms of use violation.” I’m not sure what that means. Are users not allowed to post commercials now?

According to WordPress, this is the 500th post on this blog. So in honor of the occasion, here are some fun facts that you will not find on my PhD applications. All of these are true (in a manner of speaking):

• Three different forms of contraception were not enough to prevent my birth.
• I graduated from university while still in the womb.
• I was first published at the age of seven.
• I won a city-wide math award, then never took another math class.
• I spun my car across three lanes of the interstate, and drove away undamaged.
• I’ve jumped over an avalanche, while standing on the edge of a cliff, wearing an 80 pound pack.
• I’ve gone skinny dipping in a glacier lake.
• I’ve walked between a mother bear and her cubs.
• I’ve been to the top of Mt. McKinley.
• I’ve been to 30 states and four countries.
• I’ve ridden on the top of a Jeepney, which nearly drove off a cliff.
• I’ve tramped through a Filipino jungle to meet a chainsaw-wielding stranger.
• I’ve caught a burgler in the act.
• I’ve hosted a terrorism stakeout in my house.
• I’ve disarmed a knife-wielding man.
• I’ve been on television, in the newspaper, and on the radio.
• I’ve eaten butter-flavored ice cream and avocado-flavored Popsicles.
• I’ve seen every episode of every series of Star Trek, been to a convention, and written fan fiction.
• I’ve watched a hockey game from the owner’s suite.
• I moved to Canada to break up with a girl, then married her anyway.
• According to an ancient Mayan prophecy, the world will end on my 10th wedding anniversary.

Today I gave my first undergraduate lecture, to a RELS 101 class of about 120 students. It was 9am so it took them a while to wake up, but by the end (especially after the movie clip) they were asking some excellent questions, and I acutally had to cut them off because time was running out. After the break I’ll post my lecture notes. I didn’t read them, but this is more or less what I said, so all you Hebrew Bible scholars out there can feel free to blast me for my ignorance, and I will surely “repent in dust and ashes”:

Quoted by Elie Wiesel, All Rivers Run to the Sea (pgs. 354-55); I read it in Walter Brueggemann’s Theology of the Old Testament (pg. 403 n. 6):

What is the difference between Jews and Christians? We all await the Messiah. You believe He has already come and gone, while we do not. I therefore propose that we await Him together. And when He appears, we can ask Him: “Were you here before?”… And I hope that at that moment I will be close enough to whisper in his ear, “For the love of heaven, don’t answer.”

This week’s Christian Carnival is number 300–is it really possible they’ve been doing these for nearly 6 years?–and is hosted at Brain Cramps for God. It includes my post on Stargate, the Christian Story and the Role of Humanity in the Universe.

C.S. Lewis has a great deal to say on the subject of humanity’s role in the universe, especially in chapter 14 of Miracles, some of which I agree with and some of which I remain skeptical about. Here are a couple of excerpts that bear on the conversation in the comments on my last post (once again, apologies for the gendered language):

The doctrine of a universal redemption spreading outwards from the redemption of Man, mythological as it will seem to modern minds, is in reality far more philosophical than any theory which holds that God, having once entered Nature, should leave her, and leave her substantially unchanged, or that the glorification of one creature could be realized without the glorification of the whole system. God never undoes anything but evil, never does good to undo it again. The union between God and Nature in the Person of Christ admits no divorce. He will not go out of Nature again and she must be glorified in all ways which this miraculous union demands. When spring comes it ‘leaves no corner of the land untouched’; even a pebble dropped in a pond sends circles to the margin….

For this reason I do not think it at all likely that there have been (as Alice Meynell suggested in an interesting poem) many Incarnations to redeem many different kinds of creature. One’s sense of style–of the divine idiom–rejects it. The suggestion of mass-production and of waiting queues comes from a level of thought which is here hopelessly inadequate. If other natural creatures than Man have sinned we must believe that they are redeemed: but God’s Incarnation as Man will be one unique act in a drama of total redemption and other species will have witnessed wholly different acts, each equally unique, equally necessary and differently necessary to the whole process, and each (from a certain point of view) justifiably regarded as ‘the great scene’ of the play. (pgs. 199-202)