"The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided." - Casey Stengel

I can't imagine an explanation for this pic except that he's a soccer player.

I am now on the list to receive one of the new MacBook Pros that are scheduled to ship Friday. He says it might come early in the week, but certainly by Wednesday. I'm eager to start working on it. I'm getting Office for Mac and iWork; most of the other software I use is either freeware or obsolete. I have a copy of Logos Basic that was given to me several years ago. I use it frequently but the latest version is heavier than I need and pricey. Mostly I want a Greek text of the NT, ideally in an interlinear format, and I'm guessing I can find that somehwere pretty cheap.

All the Mac users tell me that making the switch will be easy. The guys who have demonstrated how to do something - open a program, find a document, minimize a window - do it so quickly that I can't tell what they're doing. But they all say it's intuitive so I'm not worried. The one problem it looks like I'll have is moving some of my music over. My downloads from Napster have their licensing encryption built in which won't allow the Mac to open them. I can get around that by burning them to a CD and then ripping them to the Mac. Tedious, but almost all of the music we use at church is Napster music.

Exploding Figaro

I'm going to start shopping for a Bible. My NIV is falling apart, the third Bible I've had with this problem. Zondervan did a lousy job on the binding of this model. Because it's their most expensive model they used to sell it with a lifetime warranty. I say "used to" because they were taking too many of them back and stopped that program a couple of years ago. Like I said, this is my third. And I have another new one still in the box.
But I've grown increasingly frustrated with the NIV text. We'll be in 1 Cor. 13 this Sunday and they did a perfectly miserable job of translating vv. 8-10. Why did they use two different words to translate the same Greek verb used in precisely the same way within the same sentence? And they reversed the meaning of the active and middle verbs.
I'm going to spend half of my sermon time correcting the NIV in loco.
So tomorrow I'm going to look into getting an NASB. I have one but it's HUGE. Must weigh five pounds. I'd like something a little easier to hold as I preach.

Several banks are paying back the TARP funds they received. President Obama pointed out that not only is the govt. getting back that money, but while it was in the banks' hands they paid interest on those funds. So we actually made money on the deal.
Sounds good until you hear that the money the govt. is getting from these banks - the TARP funds and the interest - amounts to about 1/3 of the total money disbursed to banks.
I'm not sure a 33% return counts as great news. The jury is still out.

The "Cash for Clunkers" bill passed in the House yesterday. The Senate's sponsors want to make some fairly significant changes, including adding the option of purchasing a used vehicle from a dealer. We'll have to wait and see what the Senate does, but the President has said he'll sign the bill when it gets to his desk.
I caught Stealth Reliabity whimpering this afternoon.

The guy in Texas was supposed to have my new carb on its way Monday. I sent him an email last night asking if he'd shipped it and got a response this morning saying he hoped to get it out today. The absence of any message tonight suggests that didn't happen. I'm anxious to get Gerta back on the road, especially with the current increases in the price of gas.

See you in 24.