Heartbeat: Check

Aside: Graphic Karma, who developed the theme for this blog, just overhauled their website. Check it out!

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Just dropping a line to let people know that I am alive, despite all appearances to the contrary. Here’s what I’ve been up to.

Biggest thing in school, where I’ve been doing a lot of work on the book of Joel and Creation Theology, along with memorizing book/chapter of the New Testament. Did a fun exegesis paper on creation themes in Deutero-Isaiah and now I’m working on another interesting paper on how our relationship with dogs can inform Christian theology. Also, I discovered that Gregory of Nyssa wouldn’t be keen on me reading Song of Songs and that Hebrew students make the best home brew.

Over the summer, I will be doing my student pastor placement at a local Methodist church. That’s going to be weird. I’m chalking it up under the heading of “Growth Experience”. When I preach (and I will have to preach), I’ll put the sermon up here (like “That’s Great. Now What?” (The seven minute sermon)).

In the meantime, I’ve been working at the Climate Change Policy Partnership at Duke, which has eaten what little time my M.Div left behind. I decided not to apply for the Ruby Summer of Code, because my mandatory summer internship placement as a student pastor has killed my free time this summer: the weekly commute alone is a part-time job.

As for open source, all I’ve been working on is the SBL classes and packages, which allow you to use for Society of Biblical Literature papers and provide other nifty Bible language and citing support. (Many thanks to David Purton for letting me merge in the work I’ve done and provide an American accent to the SBL Latex project.)

Oh, and there was some work on Smokejumper-Commons which was relevant for the CCPP job—a bit of Java snuck in after all by way of EPA’s MOVES.

Work on Autobase and any of my other Grails plugins has pretty much bottomed out. The Ashlar programming language is on hold, as is work on Duby and BiteScript. Since jQuery PeriodicalUpdater is pretty easy, I’ll probably do a few tweaks, although I’m really looking for a JavaScript guru to help me figure out the nicest way to expose a stop() call to callback methods.

The book isn’t happening anymore. Long, kinda anticlimactic story behind that. The only good news in that realm is that it changed the way I thought about the Ashlar programming language. (Of course, Ashlar being put on hold means that it really has come to naught. But such is life.) I’ve also decided that if I do publish anything technical again, I’m almost certainly going to self-publish. I may end up self-publishing a few interesting bits from school, too. Remember, kids: Wil says, “Get Excited and Make Things!”, so I’m probably going to be reworking some of my academic work and throwing off some interesting little Pendle Hill-esque booklets instead of letting the work from all these cool papers drift off into the mist.

The Smokejumper IT site is probably going to be overhauled soon to focus on my open source projects instead of my consulting offerings, since my consulting offerings have become rather limited at this point. I do need a place to consolidate documentation, repositories, and comments at this point. I’ve thought about using a family of pages here EnfranchisedMind.com for that, too: can’t really decide which web property is better to host that content.

That’s pretty much everything. See you eventually!

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Comments

• April 30, 2010, staticnullvoid wrote: Glad things are going well and that your busy... Now that I'm not so bogged down but will be busy again soon. I'll take you up on any prior offer to help out with bug fixes on any grails plug-ins. i.e. autobase Sorry I'm not a JS guru enough to probably help with PeriodicalUpdater. Let me know where I can help.

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This post was by Robert Fischer, written on April 27, 2010.
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