Category: Misc

25 Years a Bible Software Developer

In 1994, just after I got married, I started working on a DOS program for doing Bible searches. Yesterday, I released version 8.3 of this same program.

Of course, the original code I wrote in 1994 isn’t actually being used any more, but what originally was known as Bible Assistant was consistently re-worked and improved to eventually become the mature application today known as SwordSearcher.

Here’s a picture of me holding up the very first order form I ever received for my Bible software.

Me, holding the very first order for my Bible software.

The order form is dated December 26, 1994. (I’m outside in a short sleeve shirt because I was living in Hawaii.)

At the time this photo was taken, my “real job” was digging ditches and working on septic systems. I didn’t know it back then, but my real job was really writing Bible software.

It took me another seven years to get to the point where I would no longer need to hold down side-jobs to pay the bills. In the early 2000s, I quit my job at RadioShack, where I helped customers find batteries and resistors for five years.

Since then I have spent most of the working hours of my days developing my own Bible software and working as an independent contractor on other people’s projects.

It only dawned on me last night, as I wrote up an announcement for version 8.3 of SwordSearcher, that I had been doing this for 25 years. What tremendous grace of God I have been shown – to be able to work on technology for studying the Bible for nearly my entire adult life!

I’m Color Blind. It’s no cure, but Enchroma glasses do work!

I hated learning colors when I was a kid. Green traffic lights look white. I’ve painted the sky purple more than once in art class.

I’m a moderate deutan — meaning I have a form of red-green color perception deficiency. You can see what it looks like here.

Enchroma sells glasses that are supposed to help a color blind person see more colors. To say I was skeptical when I first heard about it would be an understatement. Well, now I have a pair, and see for yourself my reaction.

Triple-monitor wallpaper pack 1 (5760×1200)

Modern versions of Windows (and probably other OSes too) let you span your desktop wallpaper across all monitors. I use a three-monitor setup with 16×10 monitors and had a hard time finding wallpapers that I liked that were optimal for this configuration.

So, using Apophysis 7x and Photoshop, I whipped up a bunch suited to my tastes. I figured I’d share. These are optimized for three monitors of 1920×1200 resolution each, or 5760×1200. And sure, you could use this for two monitors, too.

Rather than post the full size images to my blog, I’ll include thumbnails (are 500 pixel wide images thumbnails?) below, and you can download the whole pack in a zip file:

Brandon’s-Triple-Monitor-Wallpaper-Pack-1.zip (27.4 MB)

(Tip: if you use these, be sure to set the wallpaper mode to span, not “center ” or “fill” or anything else. These are meant to give one large image across all monitors, not three duplicate images!)

And here are the 13 wallpapers in this pack:

Apo7X-150325-31-b Apo7X-150325-664 Apo7X-150325-678 Apo7X-150325-678b Apo7X-150325-730 Apo7X-150325-771 Apo7X-150325-928 Apo7X-150325-946 Apo7X-150325-2005 Apo7X-150325-2053 Apo7X-150325-2073 Apo7X-cApo7X-150325-31

Again, I didn’t want to post the full images individually to my blog. Download the whole pack: Brandon’s-Triple-Monitor-Wallpaper-Pack-1.zip (27.4 MB)

How to get super rich and never have to work again

(Well, not really. Keep in mind that you’re reading a post by someone who is not rich and works like a dog almost every day.)

Here’s an interesting book if you’re curious about how successful technology companies get started: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston.

Founders at Work is a collection of interviews with 32 people who started, or helped start, super-successful companies like Adobe, TiVo, Blogger, Yahoo!, and more. It also includes interviews with people who founded not-very-successful-but-made-the-founders-super-rich companies, like Hotmail and Lycos. (Yes, I know, some people will disagree with me about those companies not being successful. Hotmail has had serious problems, and I think Lycos’ domain name expired yesterday. Just be glad I didn’t put Apple on that list!)

These types of books always interest me, because I am one of those individualist entrepreneur types. I don’t ever expect to “hit it big,” because my focus is always on narrow niches, but it’s still fun to read about people who, often enough, created extremely successful businesses without really trying to.

For example, PayPal began as a PDA application and initially told customers they didn’t want it to be used to pay for auctions. They eventually abandoned the initial goals of PayPal and now everybody uses it to pay for auctions.

Then there are the companies that almost collapse under their own initial success, like Blogger. Prya Labs didn’t set out to create a new “sphere” (as in blogo-), but when it did, had lots of users and no way to make any money off them. They had to lay off practically the entire company and run on fumes until someone with lots of money (Google) came in and made the one guy who stuck around super wealthy.

There are, of course, several companies represented in the book who did exactly what they set out to do. But that’s boring.

And there’s the occasional founder who was so wrapped up in what was happening to him that he doesn’t know what was going on around him: like Steve Wozniak (aka the Woz) who is still convinced that the Apple II set all sorts of records that it didn’t, and thinks Commodore passed on acquiring Apple when in fact Steve Jobs tried to push Jack Tramiel too hard and lost the chance. But I digress.

I can certainly recommend reading this book. At the very least, you’ll learn that nobody ever got rich because of a book or blog post they read, and most of the ones who do get rich don’t stop working after their bank accounts overflow.