a big challenge for the entire next year

As both a new stimulus for our spiritual quiet times and a commitment for frequent fellowship together in the scriptures, my wife and I have prayerfully decided to commit to reading the entire Bible over the next year. I have never read the entire Bible from cover to cover and am very excited to finally have exposure to all that God intended for us to read. We are praying that God will grant us wisdom during our journey through all of the scriptures and continually humble us as we continue to learn as much as we can about his majesty and glory.

After being led to this decision, I began to review the many ways that this opportunity could be undertaken. Some one-year Bible reading plans use a list of what scriptures to read each day while using your current Bible and other plans have Bibles to purchase that are rearranged into daily readings either (1) chronologically or (2) with separate NT, OT, Psalms, and Proverbs sections. I found the later choice more appealing and gives you a neat perspective from each portion of scripture every day.

Next, we needed to decide which translation we would use as a one-year Bible. (I found this translation comparison graph as a wonderful resource during my research). The NASB is my favorite translation for Bible study and exposition, but we needed one that would both read and flow well for daily reading to more easily grasp the overall context and meaning of the scriptures. This led us to consider both the NIV and NLT translations. Of these, I found the NLT to be a much easier daily read and thus was a simple choice for us (especially since we both grew up with the NIV and were interested in approaching the scriptures from a new angle).

The One-Year Bible Online web page has links to the daily reading passages that match with our Bibles from Tyndale Press and so we are able to read anywhere we have internet access as well. The passages link to Bible Gateway, which is an incredible scripture resource that will let you lookup and compare literally dozens of scripture translations.

We are over one week into our study and are very excited already at how much we have enjoyed both reading through the scripture and discussing our thoughts and questions with each other - it has both brought us closer to each other and to our Savior.

picasa photo album gallery

I have established a new location for the gallery of my photo albums as I have recently fallen in love with a new photo management software, Google Picasa 2.0 (more on that software later). I was previously using JAlbum, which is a fantastic program as well (and even produces better-looking albums), but the photo management aspect of Picasa is absolutely impressive and necessary for those like myself with lots and lots of photos to organize (I have taken just under 8,000 pictures since purchasing my first digital camera years ago). Both of these programs are free, of course, and worth checking out. You may click on the link below to see my albums.

Xibalba's Google Picasa Public Photo Album Gallery

Although most of this blog will focus on technology and other random personal interests, I hope to continually update the photo albums which will allow at least a glimpse into my existence.

this will be my new blog home

Well, it only took few a few hours of playing around with all of the features and aspects of this Google blogging software to realize that I am for sure committed to making this my new blog home. I will begin the decision process of what content will need to be transferred from my old blog and how to integrate that material on this new site. Also, I have several old websites on my hosting server that I will leave intact and then create links from this blog site to that content. I will need to play with the options of possibly using another domain with this site as well as the option to use FTP upload to another server...ah the work ahead.

Of course, I only have 2 weeks before I leave the country to serve in a hospital in Central America for several weeks so we will see how well this blog gets moved into before I depart.

welcome to existential viscera

This blog site will initially be a test set-up to figure out how I would like to manage my online existence. I am currently using WordPress on my own hosting server and am considering an easier method for management of my blogging material and also maybe even providing some mild isolation anonymity from that blog. Google offers the most incredible services and so I have to give their blogger tool a try. There also is a way to post to an FTP site other than the blogspot.com site and will have to give that a trial as well.

I plan to have this blog mostly be posts about one of my true passions and that is engineering and/or technology since those are the thoughts that scavenge through the depths of my cortex most of the time anyways...