Okay, the new search engine is installed and running. The pages don’t mesh visually with the rest of the site yet, but I’ll get that fixed up some other time — Candice should be over sometime soon, and I wanted to be done with tonight’s ‘geeking out’ before she got here.
Search disabled
I’ve just temporarily disabled the search function as I upgrade to a more powerful and full-featured search system offered by the same company. It should be back up within a couple hours at most (if all goes well). This probably means that noone will notice or care that it was down for a bit…but hey, I’m trying to keep things updated, right?
Do you have slack?
The only difference I’ve been able to see between Discordians and SubGeniuses, is that SubGeniuses get laid.
— The Rev. Ivan Stang of the Church of the SubGenius
Who wrote the bible?
Here’s some fascinating stuff courtesy of The Straight Dope — a five-part series covering the primary theories on who wrote and edited the Bible. I’ve only read the first part, but plan on going through the rest fairly soon, and may want to pick up a book they recommend in the article, Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard E. Friedman. This stuff fascinates me…here’s the links:
- Part 1: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah or Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses?
- Part 2: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various histories in the Old Testament (such as Judges, Kings, etc)?
- Part 3: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various prophetic books (Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc.) and the wisdom literature (Psalms, Proverbs, etc.) in the Old Testament?
- Part 4: Who wrote/compiled/edited (and when) the various New Testament books?
- Part 5: Who decided which books should be included and which excluded from the Bible(s)? Why are there differences in the Bibles for Catholics, Protestants, and Jews?
Looks to be some really neat reading.
On a lighter note, they’ve also got articles on jokes in the Bible and the Church of the Subgenius. Maybe not as serious, but could be equally interesting.
Word of the day: amanuensis
I generally think of myself as having a fairly good vocabulary, but yesterday at a department meeting Carrie tossed out a term that I hadn’t ever come across before — amanuensis, which she said was a synonym for secretary. We weren’t sure how it was spelled (I had guessed amenuensis, guessing that the amen used at the end of prayers could mean something like ‘the word’ [as in ‘the word of the Lord’], which could tie into a secretarial profession), but Lee was able to look it up and send us the correct spelling via e-mail. I just looked it up on dictionary.com, and here’s what they returned:
amanuensis Aman`uen”sis, n.; pl. Amanuenses. [L., fr. a, ab + manus hand.]
A person whose employment is to write what another dictates, or to copy what another has written. [Latin amanuensis, from the phrase (servus) amanu, (slave) at handwriting :a, ab, by; see ab–1 + manu, ablative of manus, hand; see man-2 in Indo-European Roots.]
I just thought it was interesting, and another two-cent word to toss in every so often. Apparently mom’s been an amanuensis for most of her working life!
Apparently I was pretty off-base about ‘amen’ having anything to do with ‘word’, however — I just looked it up on dictionary.com, here’s the result for that:
amen A*men” (?; 277), interj., adv., & n. [L. amen, Gr. ‘amh`n, Heb. [=a]m[=e]n certainly, truly.]
An expression used at the end of prayers, and meaning, So be it. At the end of a creed, it is a solemn asseveration of belief. When it introduces a declaration, it is equivalent to truly, verily.
I still think my ‘amen/word/word of God’ guess was a good one, though. :)
Archive tweaks, search engine online
I went into serious geek mode for a few hours tonight (which, unfortnately, caused me to miss Enterprise because I got lost in code and didn’t realize what time it was until Candice called at 8:30pm) and have made a few improvements to the site.
There are two relatively minor changes to the Archives navigation box on the right hand side of the page. I shortened the monthly display list so that it takes up less space, and added links to the category pages that I talked about in my last entry. I also got the templates for my blog software adjusted so that the monthly and categorized archive pages match the look of the rest of the site — previously they were still using the default style that came with the software.
The most in-depth change is the addition of a very powerfull and full-featured search engine. There is a basic search box underneath the Archives links, and a link below that to a page that explains the more advanced search queries that are possible. Basically, it’s a full-featured, Google-style search function for my site. Pretty nifty!
I’ve also adjusted the colophon to reflect the addition of the new search script.
Archives back online
It took a while, but I’ve finally managed to get all of my old archives back online after I borked things up last month. So, for the truly bored (or possibly just masochistic), you can now use the archive links towards the top right of the page to go through a month-by-month listing of everything I’ve babbled on this site, from November of 2000 to now.
Just to make things even more scary, though — because that in itself wasn’t enough for me — all the posts are even categorized. I’ll eventually be getting little icon links up in that archives box for this, but if you (for some godforsaken reason) actually want to go through what I’ve written in a slightly more organized fashion, you can. The categories are (thank you, Vanna): Lifebits (day to day ramblings, personal bits, and what’s going on in the wonderful world of Wüdi), DJbits (anything pertaining to my self-indulgent attempts at entertaining large masses of people [and the occasional massively large person]), Sitebits (my attempts to explain where I’ve botched things up most recently as I play with my webserver), Moviebits (flicks I’ve seen or bought), Trekbits (yup…I’m a trekkie [-er?] too…scared yet?), Quotebits (quotes I’ve collected generally end up here before making it to my quotebook), Humorbits (the stuff I think is funny…your mileage may vary), and Linkbits (places around the ‘net I think are worth a visit).
Go Dub-yuh!
Found this in the discussion thread after this post on Wil Wheaton’s site:
Updated Texas Rankings Under G. W. Bush:
1st in Children without Health Insurance %
1st in Toxic Air Releases
1st in Smog Days (Houston)
1st in poorest counties(3)
3rd in Hunger %
5th in Highest Teen Birth Rate
41st in Breast Cancer Screenings
45th in Mothers Receiving Pre-Natal Care
46th in Public Libraries and Branches
46th in High School Completion Rate
46th in Water Resources Protection
47th in Delivery of Social Services
48th in Literacy
48th in Per Capita Funding for Public Health
48th in Best Place to Raise Children (29th before Bush) *
48th in Spending for Parks and Recreation
48th in Spending for the Arts
49th in Spending for the Environment
50th in Women with Health Insurance
50th in Teachers’ Salaries plus Benefits
- Children’s Rights Council. Only one accredited child-care center exists for every 2,637 children. A fourth of children still are not immunized by age 2.
— Texas Freedom Network
Concrete Blonde review posted
I just got e-mail from Dean, the webmaster of a Concrete Blonde fansite. Earlier this morning I’d e-mailed him about my little writeup of last night’s show, and he went ahead and posted it on his site!
Does this mean I’m a published author now?
Still in Hollywood
It’s Thursday morning, and I’m sitting here staring slightly bleary-eyed at the computer monitor here at work, trying to do two things: firstly, kick-start my brain into gear after being up fairly late last night; and secondly, see if there’s any way I can communicate how absolutely cool the Concrete Blonde concert I went to last night was. I’m probably not going to be able to do that good of a job, but…(shrug). Trust me. It was incredible.