Ken Martin's Blog

Inspired by the very cool work at memorizable.com, I've started to put together a vocabulary tool using their freely available, incredibly portable code. It's just started, and I'm trying to find a source for the vocabulary words in order of frequency of occurrence, but at least you can give it a little run and see what you think.

Ken's Greek Vocabulary Tool

Just choose a frequency range (I've purposely grouped it into tracks as they appears on Pennington's New Testament Greek Vocabulary Guide CDs), and then click "memorize" next to the word "definition". There's a flash card mode and a matching mode, both available from the bottom of the table. I only have about words down to about 100 occurrences right now.

Feedback appreciated in the comments here.

Don't see it. Dreadful.

It visually fairly well done, but it's depressing anti-hero stuff. Definitely earned it's R rating. And the editing... good heavens. When I picked it up, I thought it would be a fun, CIA thriller spy-type thing, but the choice to use secretive terms throughout and the way it bounced around the timeline made for a hard-to-follow tangle of unenjoyable blah.

Yeah, I know, "But it was real, man." Whatever. Root canals are real. I wouldn't recommend watching one of those either.

See my lovely bride's blog to know why. :)

I asked a question on the wonderful Mac site Macintouch about multiple keyboards and multiple input languages. Basically, I want to be able to easily switch between typing Greek and English. There were some excellent responses, one in particular which had a link which led me to a little Googling, and man, are there some great resources out there.

A nice thing about Macs is they are Unicode-ready (Windows probably is now, too, but I'm not as familiar with it). Unicode is a "format" which allows for a huge number of possible "letters"; far more than we normally use. But in order to type these characters on a regular keyboard, you need key combinations; like hitting shift-4 to get a dollar sign.

Well, here's my "something back" to the vast I-want-to-type-Greek-on-my-Mac community.

Setting up your Mac

Go to the Apple Menu > System Preferences > International > Input Menu and check the checkbox for "Greek Polytonic". For me, that gives me two active Keyboard Layouts "U.S" and "Greek Polytonic".

Then under "Input Menu Shortcuts," set a Keyboard Shortcut for "Select next input source from menu". You will use this shortcut to switch between the two layouts. I use option-space.

Also, choose "Allow a different input source for each document" under "Input source options." This is really nice; it does just what it says.

Last, check "Show input menu in menu bar." It is convenient to know what keyboard you're in. This will show you a little flag in your menu bar.

Get a Good Font

Macs and PCs ship will a few fonts built in. Old-timers Times and Arial are among them. Recent versions are aware of Unicode and have a lot, but not all, of the special characters. There are some other free Greek fonts around. I like Gentium. Download and install by double-clicking the font and choosing install, or by opening Font Book and choosing the Gentium folder.

Print My Cheat Sheet

To type Greek characters, you'll need to use special key combinations. It will be a while before you have them memorized, so Mac users please feel free to download my little cheat sheet here.

Take Her for a Spin

Now, it goes like this:

1. option-space
2. start typing καί θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος
3. option-space to get back to your normal keyboard
4. send me great piles of money

That's it! I hope that helps someone get started quickly. If you see any errors or something that it would be useful to add, please let me know in the comments.

Had to post this. :)

I've declared 2007 The Year of No for myself. It's going to be a year of finishing, not starting.

I like too much. I'm interested in too much. I empathize too much. And so I say "sure I can do that" or "I should try this..."

No more. No.

I need to hit reset. To clear projects - perennially lingering projects - off my plate, and be more purposeful about what I choose to do. Why? Because I want to have more peaceful days. I don't mind busy days, but I want more peaceful days. And because I want to do things better; find out how well I can do things, not simply how many things I can do.

We'll see how it goes. :)

Local weekly newspaper City Pages has an article about the Maplewood City Council happenings. It's a nice summary of the view of some. It's not terribly balanced, but that doesn't make for as easily interesting writing. It's good to have the topic brought up, though. And I hope concerned Maplewood citizens study up on what's going on. The City Pages' article basically falls in line with the other media outlets I've noted in my commentary - Lillie Press and KSTP-TV - and with the the active critics of the "Gang of Three" manifest in places like savemaplewood.com and "What's Left of Maplewood".

Sidenote: Even writing the phrase "Gang of Three" is terribly funny to me. The above noted critics and media are simply an echo chamber of their own snappy moniker, and now "[the current Maplewood City Council majority have] effectively become a ruling troika, in the process earning the nickname."

Anyway, welcome visitors! I don't live in Maplewood. I don't know any of the folks on the city council other than what you see here in the comments, and a couple of email exchanges concerning my posts. I simply saw one little article in a local weekly newspaper which seemed obviously slanted and I commented on it.

Over the following months it became terribly interesting to me and I posted a lot. I'm a pretty conservative guy, which might not sit well with some visitors coming via City Pages, but I think that if you're interested enough to look, you'll see my commentary isn't necessarily putting forward a conservative agenda. I think it's pretty fair, and it's commentary and (neophyte) reporting that you won't have seen elsewhere. My interest is not necessarily in current majority of the city council, but the way reporting happens, research is done, and how we don't really get very balanced information from our local media.

You can find my posts on this topic here. Enjoy. Comment. Then go enjoy this beautiful day.

UPDATE: Had a nice email conversation with the article's author. Seems like a nice guy. :)

As unimpressive as the reporters (twice) were showing me their foot plunged "deep" into 2-inch snow, the actual snowfall that came over the next 36 hours was prodigious. Saturday was a perfect storybook day for the kids. Deep, sticky snow lent itself to snowballs and half a dozen forts. Occasional periods of heavy snowfall; big, fat flakes. Papa out there battling the slightly underpowered snow blower.

More snow fell Saturday night. Church was called off. More play. More snow-blowing. More storybook.

Monday morning found our streets still unplowed, so I declared a snow day for them. You can imagine their heartbreak. You can imagine Helen's heartbreak.

I made it into work just fine, and I came home to the Hump at the End of the Driveway. Just looking at it was exhausting. A snow blower won't touch that stuff. It's been compressed into impermeable blocks by tons of snowplow. I cleared half of it and went in. Tired. Friday was a sixteen hour day at work, and the weekend just kept coming. It's all a blur. A pleasant blur.

When the kids think of winter in years to come, my guess is it will be this one. There's always one that leaves its mark. The snow was so high! The flakes we so big! Wonderful.

The hideous news coverage of the snow storm swirling outside right now. Reporters strewn across the cities showing us video of their foot - heavens, yes, their whole foot - being covered when stepping into snow. Oh my goodness, has Minnesota become this pathetic?

Coming out of super busy time. Will be posting more this week.

“Worship is the submission of all of our nature to God.

It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness,
nourishment of mind by His truth,
purifying of imagination by His beauty,
opening of the heart to His love,
and submission of will to His purpose.

And all this gathered up in adoration is the greatest of human expressions of which we are capable.”