Pathfinder Bible Achievement / Bible Bowl Resource

I am pleased to announce a new, free, community-based online resource for Pathfinders and their coaches. Our new website is intended to help Pathfinders study the gospel of Matthew, preparing for the 2008 Pathfinder Bible Achievement event, sometimes referred to as Bible Bowl. The web address is http://Matthewpedia.com.

The Matthewpedia website already provides some study materials. In addition, the website is a wiki, which means that visitors have the ability to correct and add material to share with others.

In addition to study materials covering the book of Matthew, the wiki contains an introduction to wikis, as well as sections for sharing study techniques, travel advice and experiences from past PBA events.

No matter where you live, you can help Pathfinders around the world prepare for this event by contributing your expertise. This page mentions several ways that you can help.

What's Keeping Us Entertained

Our house is suddenly much busier. To see why, check the following two blog posts:

• Alien Invasion!!!
• Alien Invasion - Weekend Report

Early BP

mo-use-y
Originally uploaded by javatia

My IBM ScrollPoint Pro, the mouse I use at home, finally gave up the ghost: the primary button has reached the point at which it cannot maintain electrical contact, so single-clicks turn into double-clicks, and a drag motion turns into a series of shorter drags. This was causing problems with photo editing in Lightroom, but the final straw was clicking a link to delete a message, and finding that the click had turned into a double-click, and therefore deleted two messages.

Today, Vicki took me to Circuit City for an early birthday present, and I am now basking in the comfort of a Logitech MX Revolution. Too cool!

Sunlight Rising

Sunlight on Strings
Originally uploaded by jdashton

One of the ways that Flickr helps people to find pictures is through their Explore feature. Several times each day a program tabulates the number of views, comments and favorites that each picture has received, and determines by a complex mathematical formula a single Interestingness score for each picture. Then the top-scoring 500 photos for a given time period are made available through the Explore pages for that date. There's a degree of randomness to the process, quite a bit of circumstantial context (more than 2,500 photos were uploaded in the minute that I'm writing this), and a fair amount of who-you-know and which-groups-you're-in. For reasons completely understood only by the Magic Donkey, pictures selected for dates in the past get re-ranked based on their more recent activity, and may come and go from the list at any time.

All in all, this means that being selected for Explore is a relatively meaningless honor to which some, nevertheless, aspire.

And so, it is with a sense of dubious pride that I mention that this picture, Sunlight on Strings, was selected for the Explore set for August 3, and has appeared in positions 50 and higher, when it appears, in the Explore pages for that day. Last I looked, it was to be found on page 3, in position #22.

Um, yippee?