About Those Bilingual Keyboards on Laptops

I absolutely hate them.

My old laptop is starting to crap out (I get the BSOD on a regular basis now) and the new Logos 4 is a resource hog, so now is a good time for me to buy a new laptop.

The problem is that all laptops in Canada seem to come with these new international/bilingual/multilingual keyboards. As a touch typist, I'm used to a standard US-English keyboard layout, but the stores in Canada are filled with laptops that have the bilingual keyboards with the funny shaped ENTER key that's too far to the right, and the tiny LEFT SHIFT key that's too far to the left.

I've tried these keyboards on my friends' laptops, as well as on in-store demo models, and they are a real pain in the ass to type on. I'm forever missing the left shift key and hitting the key to the right of it by mistake, and the enter key is almost impossible to hit correctly without looking down at it.

Aside from the usual compromises made on laptop keyboards due to lack of space, there are other quirks related to the need for extra keys (mostly for accented vowels). Often they'll shift punctuation marks to a different place on the keyboard, meaning you have to hunt and peck to find them.

The thing is, I don't understand why computer companies feel the need to send laptops with these crappy keyboards to English Canada. Are they just trying to save costs by shipping the same type of keyboards to all of Canada, instead of sending separate keyboards to Quebec and the rest of Canada? Is this the result of some new law by the language police in Quebec?

Whatever the reason, it appears to have been a recent development. Last year, I can remember visiting Future Shop or Best Buy and finding plenty of laptops with the regular US keyboards. Now I can't find any.

Looks like I'll be making a trip across the border for a new laptop.

Parsed Texts on the iPhone and iPod Touch

Olive Tree is now offering parsed versions of the BHS, Mounce's Greek New Testament, and the LXX. All you have to do is download the free Bible Reader app and you can purchase and download the various parsed texts into it. At the moment it is quite pricey (BHS $70; GNT $60; LXX $75), but Olive Tree will undoubtedly put together some sort of package deal in the near future.

I've been using Olive Tree's app for quite a while as a beta tester, and I must say that its functionality is really top notch. In my opinion, it's the best bible app out there.

Logos 4.0?

Logos' twitter feed is counting down from "10" (today was "9"). Does this mean that Logos 4.0 will be announced next Friday? Logos 3.0 was launched in May 2006, which was just over 3 years ago. In other words, it really is time for an update. Furthermore, the timing means that they most likely have had a chance to tweak things for Windows 7.

Zondervan Stops Running Into Brick Wall, Joins Logos

I've never understood why Zondervan tried to keep electronic versions of its titles in house by producing its own software. It certainly couldn't have made any financial sense, and definitely didn't serve their customers.

Well, they've finally seen reason and gone into partnership with Logos Bible Software. This means, of course, that Pradis is kaput. Nice job, Zondervan. You've managed to produce your very own vaporware.

A few months ago, I seriously considered purchasing the Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis. It's certainly not the ideal Hebrew dictionary (that would be the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament) but given the dearth of what's available in electronic format, and it's cheap price ($69.95) I thought long and hard about it.

In the end, having this one title on a third bible software platform didn't make sense. I have both BibleWorks and Logos, but the two complement each other in important ways (BibleWorks for primary exegesis, Logos for its wide range of secondary titles and reference works). Pradis would essentially end up representing expensive bloatware.

In Zondervan's defense, however, I should note that they've promised discounts to people who are current users of Pradis. We'll just have to see how deep those discounts are. Hopefully they are deep enough that users of Pradis don't end up getting hosed from a financial standpoint.

Upon perusing the initial offerings, there isn't much that interests me at this point, but I may eventually spring for the aforementioned Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis. However, the suggested retail price has jumped from $129.99 (Pradis) to $199.99 (Logos).

Making matters worse, it is/was often possible to get Pradis products at good sale prices (e.g., $69.95 at Rejoice Software noted above). The Logos price, however, represents the pre-pub price, which strangely doesn't represent a discount from their suggested retail price (also $199.99). Since the pre-pub price normally represents the lowest possible price you can get a title from Logos, this represents a huge jump. The Logos price is also the suggested retail price of the book set ($199.99), but again, usually you can get them at a discounted rate.

On the whole, though, this is good news. The more titles available on a single platform, the better. I like Logos as a portable Library, and the addition of Zondervan titles only strengthens it. Bravo Zondervan, for finally seeing the light. Now, can you do something about the price?

Kings

I finally got around to watching the 13 episodes of Kings, an NBC TV series that flamed out and died rather quickly. Because it was abundantly clear that it was headed for cancellation after just four episodes, I didn't expect much, and was pleasantly surprised.

The show is based on the biblical story of King David but set in a modern world. It might be best to characterize it as an alternate reality or even fantasy/sci-fi. It's not unlike the modern day film adaptations of Shakespeare such as Romeo + Juliet (with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes) and Hamlet (with Ethan Hawke).

The names are changed, but most of the characters are taken straight out of the biblical narrative. The plot is more or less faithful to the bible broadly speaking, but also departs from it at numerous points.

All in all it's a well done melodrama. Ian McShane does a magnificent job portraying King Saul/Silas. The show tries really hard to make Silas/Saul as sympathetic as possible within certain dramatic restrictions. There are a number of very touching scenes between David and Silas, that would have held tremendous dramatic potential in later seasons if the series had continued. The tragic dimension of Saul's/Silas' fall is really well portrayed. Of course, they had a very fine model in Shakespeare's Macbeth upon which to draw.

It's a real shame that the show didn't survive, but the ratings were simply horrible, and it's difficult to figure out why. It's vastly superior to most of what passes for entertainment on TV nowadays. It's not as good as other short-lived TV series like Wonderfalls and Firefly, but it was pretty damn good.

Michael Green, the creator of the show, speculates that not promoting it among religious groups was a mistake. In fact, the marketers deliberately avoided making reference to the religious inspiration for the show. However, the rationale of the marketers is easy enough to figure out once you've seen the series. The bottom line is that the show itself isn't particularly "religious" (as non-religious people would say it).

The characters in the show basically assume modern mores, rather than religious ones. The ethos of the world that the show creates is basically non-religious; or perhaps a better way to put it is that it's religious in a way that non-religious people imagine religious belief should and does look like. There's a lot of mention of God and miraculous signs, but there's no real depth to the treatment of religious themes.

In short, the marketers quite clearly didn't want to scare off the obvious target audience of the show which was primarily (perhaps surprisingly) non-religious.

In the end, it appears that the marketers of the show felt that the show wasn't likely to garner much of an audience among devout believers of either the Jewish or Christian faith. It's probably true, and no less a shame for it.

Green also speculates that the marketers were afraid of backlash from religious groups because of some of the plot elements in the show. I don't actually believe this can be true, because it's unbelievably stupid. Controversy almost always sells.

It's true that there's some typical Hollywood politically correct silliness woven into the plot that would probably offend some religious sensibilities but the marketers should have deliberately tried to stoke controversy, particularly when they realized that the ratings were as bad as they initially were.

After all, bad publicity is better than no publicity. As it is, the show, which cost in the neighborhood of $50M to produce the 13 episodes, died an ignominious death anyways. What did they have to lose?