No riding today. Not that I don’t feel energetic enough, but it’s feaking hot and it requires exceptional energy to face heat on long bike rides over the hills out here. So I settled for slapping on a knee brace and taking a hike. I think I got the very last sand plum to ripen in the immediate area, and it was perfectly ripe, indeed — sweet and juicy without a hint of bitterness.
While I did test CentOS 7 on my Dell 15-3542, I knew it was only testing. It can’t identify the touchpad on this thing, which is no surprise. This laptop is cheap, but it runs the latest Haswell series CPU and everything that goes with it. CentOS 7 is a little dated. So when I was finished with the various tests, I decided to try Debian 8 with KDE. I’ve never had any OS make the touchpad work this well. It has ranged from nightmare on Kubuntu to quite rough on Windows (7 & 8), and dead on CentOS 7. Without KDE on Debian 8, it was just manageable. With KDE, it’s actually usable and not infuriating. Dell used probably the cheapest touchpad product available from Snyaptic. Even though the official drivers from the Synaptic website are far better on Windows than what Dell provides, it is hard to make it usable on Windows under any condition. Now it behaves rather sanely.
As noted in the previous post, Bibletime was never properly released on Debian 8, so I grabbed the source from the developers’ GitHub site and built it from scratch. It works just fine. I’m working on Proverbs 15 today, and then I’ll have the weekly lesson in Psalms this evening. Believe it or not, studying Proverbs is not dreary, but it is time-consuming.
For the parish membership, I reaffirm that I no longer favor the NET Bible translation. I’ve come across too many places where the translators rather arbitrarily decided to guess at corrections to the text sources for the Old Testament. I don’t have any crazy hang-ups about the original Hebrew texts; the Hebrew people were pretty relaxed about that sort of thing. However, too often the resulting NET translation violates Hebrew literary patterns, though it won’t be obvious to anyone who doesn’t learn to use heart-logic for moral rendering. Head-scholarship isn’t good enough. So for now, I’ll use Green’s Modern King James Version (MKJV) here on the blog for the most part, and the New King James Version (NKJV) for most study references. At times, I might argue with any standard translation, so that’s not the point. These two are very similar and there are no copy restrictions on the MKJV, but you will have to supply modern punctuation (especially quotation marks). While I am well aware that they both rely too much on the Masoretic (Pharisaical) text, they do include the Septuagint more often and seldom engage in frivolous guessing as the NET translators do.
God bless you all.
