While working on the links for the previous post on the ESV for Bible+ on the Palm I ran across the ESV Blog interview of Mark Altrogge who has set Bible verses to music to aid Scripture memorization. He currently has 6 CDs available each with about 20 different sets of scriptures and costing just under $10 each.

The six CDs at his website, forevergrateful.com, have lots of samples from each CD that you can listen to. The ESV interview also hosted 2 full songs:

• Psalm 46:1-3 (mp3)
• Jude 24-25 (mp3)

I am impressed with what I have listened to so far. I may purchase the CDs for home use and also for kid’s Sunday School class I help teach. Will have to wait for Mystie’s opinion :)

Update 04/26/06: It appears the ESV files have been taken down temporarily but are supposed to be back up shortly.

I was checking for upgrades on Bible+ that I use on my Palm and found out that the English Standard Version (ESV) has been made available. This amazes me! But then again the ESV site has more ways to use and access it than any other version that I am familiar with. Here is the link to the Palm Bible+ ESV files.

Bible+ for the PalmOS has to be one of the best software packages available on the Palm and it is free. Its integration with the Plucker Plugin Interface allows it to go directly to dictionaries (including bible dictionaries). Besides the NKJV and now ESV versions I have a Spanish version and the New Testament in Greek. Couple those with Matthew Henry’s Complete Commentary, Jamieson Fausset Brown and I am set!

Two of the new features in version 3.2 that look interesting:

• Added support to parse clipboard text at start up. If there is something starting with the ~ char it expects something like ~[version,] book chapter[:verse], i.e. ~ESV, Jhn 3:16 will go to John 3:16 in the ESV version.
  So you can copy a reference into the clipboard from something you are reading or working on and then when you open Bible+ it will go right to the verse.
• Boolean search – so you can use AND, OR, and NOT operators. Plus two wild card operators; “?” and “..”. The “?” matches zero or more characters at the beginning or end of a search term and the “..” operator can be placed between search terms.

Today’s cartoon from the Calvin & Hobbes archive shows a dad after my own heart.

A neighbor is moving and lent me his Craftsman Yard Vacuum to try to entice me into buying it. I used it for about two hours and filled the 2 bushel bag 5 times. I estimate that the mulched leaves would have been the equivalent of about 20 garbage bags full. It did a pretty good job, especially since the leaves had gotten wet and embedded in the grass. I had one of the boys go behind me and rake loose the leaves it did not pick up and they were easily sucked up the second time around. I then used the hose attachment to clean out my window wells and the landscaped areas around the house.

It did a pretty good job. We have a couple of mature trees and the next door neighbor has a couple of sycamore trees that drop leaves for a couple of months. With a rake it is a never ending job and the many many bags of leaves that have to be disposed of one way or another. This yard vacuum mulches them pretty well so that there are much fewer bags to deal with.

This latest image of the Crab Nebula from the Hubble Telescope is fantastic. I have set it as my desktop background. The HubbleSite has a bunch of different sizes of the image available for viewing and printing.

This is a mosaic image, one of the largest ever taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope of the Crab Nebula, a six-light-year-wide expanding remnant of a star’s supernova explosion. Japanese and Chinese astronomers recorded this violent event nearly 1,000 years ago in 1054, as did, almost certainly, Native Americans.

The orange filaments are the tattered remains of the star and consist mostly of hydrogen. The rapidly spinning neutron star embedded in the center of the nebula is the dynamo powering the nebula’s eerie interior bluish glow. The blue light comes from electrons whirling at nearly the speed of light around magnetic field lines from the neutron star. The neutron star, like a lighthouse, ejects twin beams of radiation that appear to pulse 30 times a second due to the neutron star’s rotation. A neutron star is the crushed ultra-dense core of the exploded star.

The Crab Nebula derived its name from its appearance in a drawing made by Irish astronomer Lord Rosse in 1844, using a 36-inch telescope. When viewed by Hubble, as well as by large ground-based telescopes such as the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the Crab Nebula takes on a more detailed appearance that yields clues into the spectacular demise of a star, 6,500 light-years away.

The newly composed image was assembled from 24 individual Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 exposures taken in October 1999, January 2000, and December 2000. The colors in the image indicate the different elements that were expelled during the explosion. Blue in the filaments in the outer part of the nebula represents neutral oxygen, green is singly-ionized sulfur, and red indicates doubly-ionized oxygen.

John W. Fountain is a a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a great testimony in the NPR Series This I Believe :

Here are some excerpts:

I believe in God. Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky that Mama told me as a little boy “always was and always will be.” But the God who embraced me when Daddy disappeared from our lives — from my life at age four — the night police led him away from our front door, down the stairs in handcuffs.

I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ. The God who allowed me to feel His presence — whether by the warmth that filled my belly like hot chocolate on a cold afternoon, or that voice, whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was His, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.

I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba — Daddy.

It wasn’t until many years later, standing over my father’s grave for a long overdue conversation, that my tears flowed. I told him about the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another. Or that He — God, the Father, God, my Father — had found me.

Scott Adams in his Dilbert Blog talks about there being thieves everywhere:

Today my wallet was stolen for the 400th time, and frankly I’m sick of it. I don’t know what bothers me more – the crime or the fact that the thief always sneaks back into my home an hour later and puts the wallet back in a hard-to-find place such as the top of my dresser.

There’s never anything missing from the wallet, so I know the thief isn’t especially good at his job. It might be the same idiot who keeps stealing my car every time I park it at the airport. He always refills the gas tank and parks it somewhere in the general vicinity of where I know I left it, but still it’s rude and unsettling.

This is truly hilarious! Probably more so because I have a certain child of driving age who has a similar problem with her car keys.