I remember going to different churches in Chile (and then in the States), and priests or pastors would talk about having faith for something or doing it by faith. They never explained what they exactly meant. You have to “apply your faith” and “you have to have faith”. “Do it by faith”. It always sounded […]
The very first “computer” I used was really a Burroughs punched-card reader. I used it to help me tabulate the results of a survey I had done for my thesis for a Journalism degree at the University of Chile. (This was somehow equivalent to a B.A. degree in the U.S.) I used the machine in […]
I remember that my first argument did not end well. I was still at the parochial school when a girl called Pura, who we all knew was very rich, said something about my father. The strange thing is that I do not remember what she exactly said about my father but, for an instant I […]
Continuing with the training on how to use computers to translate the Bible, I made another trip to Guatemala for the purpose of teaching the translators to use the software to help them expedite the whole process. The first thing I had noticed while traveling to the city where the translators lived was the abundance […]
Another interesting situation took place while I was taking computers to the different translation projects and training them to use the software, I took a monitor to a translation project in the North of Guatemala. The trip by bus from Ciudad de Guatemala to the remote place near the border with Mexico took about 8 […]
There I was on the first day of my biggest adventure ever. I had been admitted to the University of Texas in Austin. It was 1974. I had made it to the street which, when any Texan said it, sounded as Wada Loop. In fact, it was Guadalupe Street in Austin, Texas. I asked several […]
Driving back to Antofagasta from Santiago was really another adventure. After seeing our movie, or movies, visiting with my parents and relatives for a bit and buying some provisions that were much more expensive in Antofagasta, especially wine and Pisco (which is really a brandy made out of grapes and completely transparent, if it is […]
Translating a written text into another language requires a number of steps, and many more when it is for a minority language with a newly established orthography or alphabet and no or few previously written materials in that language. In the early days of transitioning translation projects from a purely manual process to a computer-assisted […]
In 1985, I had just started working at United Bible Societies when I was told that these missionaries working in Argentina were going to come through Miami to pick up their laptop. It was at the end of 1985 and the portable Toshiba T1100 had just come up with MS-DOS 2.1, an internal 3.5 floppy […]
At my job in Dallas, I hired a girl who had something different in her attitude about the world, and we became friends. I told her that I would talk about anything but politics or religion. She said: “What about philosophy?” I said, “yes, I like philosophy”, and she gave me a copy of The […]
An Ear by Mistake 
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