Addendum to last post.

I forgot to cover the second subject I mentioned in my subject yesterday. I wrote a paper on the problems of Jehovah's Witness doctrines entitled The Evidence Against “What Does God Require Us?”. If you are currently wondering if the Watchtower organization is right in their publications I urge you to read the evidence that states the opposite. You can also find more information on this subject in the free resource section of CRI's eQuip.org.

Accordance for iPad

I've been testing Accordance's iPhone and iPad app since it first appeared at the end of 2010. With the advent of synchronization with the desktop version of the software, anyone looking for serious Bible software for iOS devices really should download a free copy.

Having Calvin's commentaries, Keil and Delitzsch, NIBC, Word Biblical Commentary and (for quick reference) the ESV Study Bible all available on a device the size of the iPad is pretty amazing. As much as I still love real, paper books, Accordance for iPad really makes it easy to use these resources all the more, since they are now always with me.

Accordance

I've been using the Accordance Bible Software package for a number of months now in preparation for a review on OFB. I've liked it enough that I bought several modules that were useful for seminary studies. After years of trying to contend that SWORD was a nearly ideal Bible software system, I finally have to admit it isn't — no wonder I typically didn't even use it. Accordance blows it away and works well enough I've finally all but kicked the habit of preferring BibleGateway to my copy of MacSword. That's not to be harsh on the SWORD folks, they are a dedicated and talented bunch — they are simply working at some what of a disadvantage.

But the big point is that Accordance is really amazing. Accordance just gets a lot of things right with its unique, well thought out interface, and they have a lot of the best, most authoritative study resources available.

All that to say, I attended an Accordance all day seminar on Monday and am even more impressed having been introduced to more of what this program can do. Case and point: using Accordance's nicely designed drag and drop query builder, you can build a rule that will search for occurrences of the Granville Sharp Rule (two singular nouns governed by a single article and a conjunction). Unfortunately, my Greek text does not have nouns tagged as being common or proper, otherwise it would be perfect, for Accordance supports throwing in the final condition of Granville Sharp, namely that the nouns must be common. I suppose if you buy a different Greek module, then, it would be quite possible to run the full rule through. But even with that limitation on the standard Nestle-Aland/UBS module, this still demonstrates a breakthrough in easy, powerful searching — it's surely saves a lot of time when trying to do textual analysis!

I'm just amazed.

About Fantastico

Eduardo upgraded to WordPress 1.2.2 the other day, and when he did, I asked him if he had used Fantastico to perform the upgrade. Ed followed my advice to Eduardo and that killed his blog. Well, not really, but it made it look like it had choked. As it turned out, Fantastico did not run the upgrade.php script included in WordPress, and thus the database was not arranged properly.

I checked around Fantastico and could not find a way to fix it directly from there. But, running the aforementioned script did the trick just fine. I thought I'd share this in case anyone else tried to follow my advice.

AAPL Improves Year-over-Year. Again.

Tim Cook commenting today on Apple's second quarter performance for 2012:

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million,” he said. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”

HT: Gruber

AAPL and the "Butler Curse"

My dad has always joked about the “Butler Curse,” a curse that dooms any stock that a Butler invests in to sinking share prices or something worse. He came to believe this after having the two or three forays he made into the stock market plummet quickly after he took ownership of the shares.

At times, I almost think there was something to it. As you may recall, I purchased a small number of shares of AAPL (that's Apple, if you don't keep up on your stockspeak) right before Jobs' keynote at MacWorld in January. The stock went up about ten dollars beyond what I bought it at ($72 a share, I believe it was), but then began a steady decline that continued until about two or three weeks ago. The shares sank when the new Intel Macs came out ahead of schedule. They sank when critics lauded the new Intel Macs. They sank when more Intel Macs came out. They sank when Apple outperformed the rest of the industry. They sank and sank, bottoming out at about $50.

I planned to buy more before WWDC '06, but it started going up just before I did so, and I almost did not go through with the plan to buy my pre-WWDC shares. I decided to go ahead and buy some at $69.50 yesterday and then sell it when it appeared to top out after the keynote — I'm thinking we'll see it hit between $85 and $90 after the keynote.

That sounded really good when I ordered the shares right before the market close yesterday. I logged on this morning to find something had happened last night: Apple announced it would have to restate its earnings back to 2002 due to accounting irregularities with stock options. Fortunately, my order did not go through until this morning, when after-market trading had already forced the stock's opening price down to $67. Unfortunately, it was already about a dollar lower than that and sinking by the time I looked.

I almost decided to cut my losses and sell. I actually setup a trigger to sell if it hit $64. The Butler Curse had struck AAPL shares not once, but twice — in six months! I was a believer, I really could destroy companies by buying their stock. Sure, I own a bit of a few funds, but the only standard stock I own falls every time I buy it. (This could actually be a thing I could make money with, I suppose, but killing companies isn't exactly my type of business.)

Fortunately, the stock closed up about a dollar from where I bought it, but I'm still not so sure. Beware if I buy into any company you own equity in or work for.

A Year of Mac

It dawned on me the other day that I ordered my first modern Mac, the Ruby iMac G3/400, off of eBay one year ago yesterday (June 5). Over the last year I have had the enjoyable pleasure of getting to know another UNIX-like operating system, and I must admit, I've really come to like it.

The Ruby iMac is a neat machine, certainly it was a bargain for $999 in 2000 when it was new, considering that even then it came standard with Firewire, a NIC, 128 megs of ram, a 12 gig hard disk, a slot loading CD drive, Harmon-Kardon built-in speakers, and a 15” CRT monitor. While the eMac offers a much more modern replacement for the old iMac G3, its white case opaque with super larger tray loading DVD drive door just doesn't seem as bold and exciting as the system that is often said to have saved Apple. While design doesn't make a system, it can make it more interesting.

This particular model was a later iMac, sometimes referred to as an iMac DV, although the DV title was dropped by that time (partially, I suspect, since it didn't have a DVD drive). It is referred to unofficially as the Indigo series and officially as the “iMac (Summer 2000).” You can read more about it here.

It's kind of a shame that the colorful computer trend died off. The iMac was really a fun concept and even today the Ruby iMac looks almost more like a piece of modern art than simply a computer.

A Week with the iPhone

After a week, I can still say I love this device. I'm working on a full fledged review for OFB, so I won't go into details, but all I can say is that despite the well publicized limitations, the device is such a pleasure to work with, one forgets about those things. There are a few complaints I have, but all of them are software related and could easily be fixed when iPhone OS 1.1 is pushed out sometime (I suspect) in the near future.

I setup my visual voicemail today and was surprised I didn't have to encounter a single voice prompt menu to do so. The iPhone recorded my message and set my passcode all from its own interface, then sent both the recording and the passcode to AT&T for me. No “press 1 to save your message, press 2 to hear it, press 3 to rerecord your message.”

I am a bit paranoid to walk around with this thing. I wish AT&T would offer its phone insurance for it. But, I figure I carry my laptop around all the time, so why not a phone?

A Sign of the Times

From the Microsoft Bing blog:

What you're seeing today is only the beginning. Lasso moves Bing beyond the search box. Although it will only be available in Bing for iPad to begin with, we're already thinking about how to take Lasso even further — so stay tuned.

Lasso is a novel idea — the sort that fits the “new Microsoft” that seems to be emerging and releasing really great products like Windows Phone 7. Note, however, that Lasso is being released first on the iPad, not Windows 7 Tablet Edition or even Android. This speaks very clearly about what Microsoft understands about the mobile OS market right now.

HT: John Gruber

A New Kind of Problem

Well, the new pope has been in office for two days (well, unofficially, I guess — I know his installation into “office” has not occurred yet) and he already has a 21st century kind of problem to deal with. Cybersquatting, namely.

It seems that a creative Floridian decided, just before Pope John Paul II died, to buy up the names he thought a new pope might go by. As it turns out, he hit the “jackpot” with BenedictXVI dot com (personally, I do not recommend visiting the site, as I understand he has ads on it, and I have no desire to support cybersquatting). He wants a papal hat and a free stay at the Vatican in exchange for the name.

I wonder where that puts him in Dante's Inferno?