The Lord has been talking to me about a big project. Really big. Big enough to make me nervous enough that I've been procrastinating it for longer than I feel comfortable admitting. My mission, if I should choose to accept it is to work on a translation of the Bible. As one does.

Now that I've surrendered, this means a number of things. First, there's the matter of learning Biblical Greek. Second will be Biblical Hebrew. I will need to learn each of these languages far better than average. Translation is tough work and excellent language skills are required in both the source and target languages. Third, I will need to upgrade my publishing skills. I have a number of self-published books already under my belt, but a Bible (even allowing for just starting with the New Testament first) is a more complicated undertaking. And fourth, I gotta find a way to have fun in the process.

How does a guy have fun with Bible translation? I don't know how anyone else does it, but my plan is to translate it twice. The primary way will be the official way that other translators do it, lots of books and scratching my head and fussing over individual Greek words. The adding some fun into the mix will be to run a parallel translation where I do everything programmatically. Yes, this is crazy, but it's for fun. Even the name is fun. My current project codename for this is the "Bad Automatic Translation". Which makes it the BAT Bible and who doesn't think that isn't a fun name?

Expanded notes from my Easter sermon.

54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 15:54-57

My title is a reference to a line in a movie, but I think that it is appropriate for the occasion. Let me tell you why.

I'm about a month and a half into my second year of driving my big yellow school bus. A number of things have stabilized to make my life easier. First, this is no longer my first year, so while I'm still finding new things, there are fewer of them and that helps keep me from being surprised. Second is the fact that I have my own assigned route this year. I'm only driving in the mornings, but it's always the same route and I got used to it pretty quickly. I was going to drive afternoons as well, but I'm doing some part-time computer work with a friend and so I let go of my afternoon route. This actually worked out well, because one of the other drivers really wanted it.

I drove a route for summer school this year and that helped get some of the students used to me. They now get quite excited to see me when I'm picking them up at their stops. Some of my students are quite rowdy, but I'm used to telling them to settle down, so I always win the battle of wills that ensues. It doesn't hurt that I can write them up and get them progressively punished, all the way up to their bus riding privileges being revoked.

I guess I'm just lucky (and you certainly can't rule out the possibility that I'm highly blessed and favored of the Lord), but in over a quarter of a century of professional IT software development, I have been on more successful projects than unsuccessful ones.

Full disclosure demands that I admit that some of those projects were declared successful by management despite a complete lack of evidence of any actual success, but as a humble developer on said projects, we would all get tarred with the success brush, so none of us minded that.

Through conversations with co-workers and using my observational skills, I quickly learned that successful projects are few and far between. I suppose you could argue with my definition of successful project, but that's also part of the problem, that there is no widely accepted definition of what constitutes a successful project. Within corporate IT a successful project is generally one that is declared a success by management. When this happens a party is scheduled, everyone gets cake and coffee and if there's anything left in the budget the developers get a t-shirt or a hat.

By BBC_Micro.jpeg: Stuart Brady derivative work: Ubcule (talk) - BBC_Micro.jpeg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11672213

I do not remember after all these years, the circumstances under which I obtained my BBC Micro. This was a good 30 years ago now, but I do remember that I loved it and it saw me ably through the start of my Computer Science degree at the University of Plymouth.