Still searching around to find a better archiving solution than a clickable calendar. Nearest I can locate so far all involve writing my own scripts from near-scratch, something my aching head isn't up for at the moment. I prefer the copy/paste/tweak method myself.
But while I was snooping around I did happen across a curious article about gene-splicing a Mac and a TiVo into one truly impressive sounding Digital Hub Machine. Well, OK, it's not really gene-splicing -- but it's a seriously geeky and useful looking sort of Mac hack (as opposed to the infamous Macquarium hacks). Since I know at least three of my Mac-using readers either own or are looking into TiVo, thought I'd pass it along.
So where's the meditative part of this stray thought? One of the objections I used to have to the various theological research tools (my personal favorite is still the windoze only BibleWorks) early on is that it changed the scholarly process, eliminating those moments where one would get devotionally sidetracked and take a leisured roam into theological tangents. It's slower and more romantic, all that tedious leafing through those multiple volume sets of various five-pound tomes, and then stumbling across some exegetical curiosity or strange cross-reference to something else that had been rolling around in the back of my mind. When the software tools first started gaining ground in my discipline, the thing I knew I'd miss most was the wandering and pondering and wondering that goes with manual study...
Truth be told, I still prefer doing my research by hand. And I still think the nature of the tangents one comes across during manual study is different, because there are fewer of them and because they tend to be more directly related to the theological task at hand. And those tangential differences result in even the extraneous thoughts being helpfully hung in the brain where one can more readily think of them when the time comes for them to actually become useful to someone.
But I have to admit, technology has not eliminated tangents and stray thoughts, but multiplied them -- almost grotesquely. And so, kind reader, that's how the leaven of a TiVo link ended up leavening the whole lump of one little stray thought about the exegetical endeavor. *sigh*
