SBL, Night 2

Technically the night isn’t over yet, but I figured I would go ahead and post my nightly entry. If anything else happens, I guess I’ll post again!

The day started at promptly 7:30. Without breakfast Hall Harris and I walked the three blocks from our hotel, through the riverwalk area, to the convention center at about 8:30. And the hectic day began. The booth workers were as follows: Hampton Keathley, Todd Lingren, Greg Harrick, Jeff (sorry, don’t remember your last name), Hall Harris, Dave Austin, Dave Foran and Chris Goodman. Hope I’m not leaving anyone out.

The first person of interest that I met was the fellow biblioblogger Stephen Carlson, of Hypotyposeis fame. I’m really glad he stopped by, though we couldn’t talk for very long. His lecture was coming up and he was understandibly a little anxious about it. Hope it went well for you.

Soon after I noticed that the first bit of Biblia Hebraica Quinta has come out, but only a few bucks. Pretty expensive. I thought about ordering the volume (they already sold out), but I decided to wait. Unfortunately the full thing won’t be out till around 2010.

I cut short my looking at an LXX lexicon at the American Bible Societies booth to go listen in on a conversation between Hall and N.T. Wright about the new NA27 diglot. I was hoping that I might learn something by osmosis just standing close to him, but that doesn’t really work. He couldn’t stay long, so I wasn’t able to ask any juicy questions. Bummer.

Next I was blessed with a brief conversation between Roy Brown of Accordance software. He had apparently read my recent posts to the Lexel site and enjoyed them, though he did mention one thing that he was displeased with. I’m sure I’ll be posting about that sometime later. We had a short but good conversation. He invited me over to the Accordance booth to check out some new stuff that they are coming out with, and I’m sure I will tomorrow. Very nice guy.

Later Chris Skinner and Kelly Iverson came by. Chris was an intern with Dan Wallace the year before I was, and Kelly was one of my fellow interns. We chatted for a while and that was nice. They are both at Catholic University of America working on their PhDs right now and seem to be enjoying themselves immensely.

Next I had a good conversation with a guy from SIL named Jim Clark. Gave a demo of the NET GEMS Project and what we’re doing and discussed the very cool and important work that they do. Thanks for coming by.

Later I saw Joel Willits walking down the aisle, so we stopped and chatted a bit. Joel graded some of my work at DTS and is a pretty cool guy. He’s currently working on his PhD at Cambridge. Unfortunately our conversation got cut short because I gave a quick demo of the NET GEMS stuff to someone that I’m not sure I can talk to you about because of possible confidentiality reasons.

Later I wandered around the large exhibit hall looking for the BibleWorks booth. I found it and had a nice talk with Michael Tan about C#, C++, .NET, and Mono. It was of course good to talk to him. He’s very nice and I really dig their software. My personal favorite.

Just a few minutes later I met with Rick from Logos, another bibliobloggers (couldn’t find your blog as of this post, Rick -- don’t have my rss feed engine here on the read). We talked a little about what we were both working on. Enjoyed it. Nice to meet you.

The most exciting event of day happened at the very end. After it was over I was, frankly, ecstatic. And no, I can’t tell you anything about it! I want to SO bad. All I’ll tell you is that it had something to do with the NET GEMS project. Great news! Important news! I probably can’t say anything for a while though. Sorry. I just had to say something on here about it, though. Just to make you wonder...

Other than that I was standing in the NET Bible booth talking about the new diglot, or I was wandering around looking at books.

Tonight we (Gregg, Dave F, Chris, Todd, Pati Wallace, and myself) went to Fudruckers to eat. Good hamburgers.

Now I’m sitting here relaxing. My legs hurt, so this is great.