flin-go |fli NG gō|

noun ( pl. -gos or -goes) informal often humorous or derogatory

1. a localised English dialect heavily influenced by facebook: his lack of fluency in flingo marked his advanced age. See note at DIALECT.
2. the vocabulary, jargon, and mangled grammar endemic to a particular online community : “you’re”, known in flingo as “your”, is a contraction of “you are”, not to be confused with the possesive adjective; status updates in which a slide from third person to first or second person are prime examples of flingo.

ORIGIN early 21st cent.: probably via English lingo via Portuguese lingoa from Latin lingua “tongue“. See also myspeech and leetspeak.

SOURCE first use attributed to Kristy Freney.

Wow. In 2-5 years time, some predict you could buy a 1 petabyte hard drive.

That’s a very big disk.

50 petabytes is enough to store ‘the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages.’

And only $750 for a 1 PB drive (I assume it would be ‘PB’, as in GB for Gigabyte, TB for Terabyte). That’s $37,500 for storage of all the written works of humanity. Bargain.

[UPDATE: I mucked up the passage list somehow, so the verse numbers were often missing (the chapters were right though). I've corrected it, so it should work properly now. Get the new passages archive.]

Further to the script I whipped up for daily Bible reading, I’ve generated some more data sets corresponding to the other plans listed on the Bible Gateway. I’ve only done the full year plans, as mucking around with shorter ones wasn’t something I wanted myself, and are tricky to get to fit. If there’s demand, I can make others, or you can copy the syntax and generate your own plans.

To use any one of these, download the archive and replace your current data file with your choice of the following:

• DailyReadingPassages-OTNT.txt: this is the file included in the applescript utility in the previous post. Read through both the Old and New Testaments concurrently.
• DailyReadingPassages-TNKNT.txt: this is a modification of the OT/NT pattern, but the Old Testament progresses according to the Hebrew canonical ordering, not the English ordering (‘Torah‘, the Pentateuch, ‘Nevi’im‘, the Prophets, and ‘Ketuvim‘, the Writings: Tanakh, for short).
• DailyReadingPassages-Beginning.txt: this plan simply starts at the beginning and reads straight through to the end of the Bible (English ordering).
• DailyReadingPassages-Historical.txt: this plan orders the readings according to the events within the passages, arranged in chronological order from creation onwards. I’m not sure how the dating was done (there’s lots of places where dates are contested, or unknown), so maybe take this with a grain of salt at points.
• DailyReadingPassages-Chronological.txt: finally, this plan is arranged by date of composition. Again, I don’t know the reasoning behind some of the decisions; I’m assuming a conservative set of dates apply.

Enjoy.

And get reading.

[image credit: flickr:Steve Keys]

Just the other day Stan pointed out, quite rightly, that reading the Bible can easily take second place to reading other things, like blogs and news feeds.

One solution that may be a good one is to subscribe to the news feed of the Bible Gateway’s Daily Reading plans – that way, while you’re reading all the other stuff each morning, you’ve got a chapter or three of the Bible to read as well. There’s a few different plans to choose from (although for my money it looks like the Old/New Testament plan is the best option).

I tried this for a sum total of two days before my frustrations with it got the better of me.

First, my news reader isn’t a great place to read the Bible. The font isn’t quite right, and all my instincts born of skimming scores of news posts each morning militates against attentive reading. Second, the feed (I assume) is made with the US in mind, so it arrives here at 3pm. That means it’s not fresh each morning. Third, I have good bible software on my machine already.

These aren’t huge problems. But it’s not quite right, and I’m a stickler for getting things working nicely (just in case you hadn’t noticed).

So, I came up with another solution. I’ve got an alarm that goes off in iCal at 6am each morning (that is, before I open my machine, so it actually triggers as soon as I log in). This alarm runs a little app I wrote which works out the passage(s) for the day, and brings them up in Accordance, laid out with the Hebrew and Greek beside the English for good measure, so I can see what’s going on more deeply if I want to. So far, it’s working well.

If you’d like to grab this script and set it up for your machine, keep reading for details.