I know it's been a long time since this has been updated, but while I get things in order, you can head to http://justiceknight.vox.com to read my blog. I'm in Rome for the next 4 months at the Angelicum, so it should be quite a blast.

- Posted by at 3:00 AM

All archives should now be restored and comments and trackbacks should be working. If there are any technical difficulties, please e-mail me at the address listed on the right side bar.

- Posted by at 5:53 PM

The silence of late has had to do with issues connected with my old host, Fuitadnet, and the incompetence of their technical support staff. For a long story kept short, Movable Type has been inoperable for about 2 weeks due to its inability to locate key Perl modules on my server. Others have lately been complaining about hacks and downed sites, so it's probably just as well I left.

The blog is now hosted by Netfirms, due to a friend's generous offer of excess space and bandwidth, and coincidentally, they have a Buffalo office. There are still kinks to be worked out, and not everything in the system is working yet - particularly the archives - but it should be ironed out in the next few days.

- Posted by at 2:31 PM

This isn't really a big thing, since trackbacks aren't used much, but the trackback system has been shut off to end a massive flow of spam. When I have a chance to upgrade the spam blockers, I'll turn it back on.

Comments are still enabled.

- Posted by at 2:05 PM

Upgrading 3rd party software is NOT fun. Visitors this evening may have noticed the menu acting haywire, which was the result of me continually swapping out old/new code, tinkering with the data files, and finally giving up and trying to restore the old version. Thankfully, the Internet Archive had a copy from which I was able to rebuild it. I have settled for changing a few links in the menu.

In other news, my gallery URL has changed. The new version can be found here (I know it's dumb, but the capital really does make a difference). Some new photos have been uploaded, including some from Franciscan University.

- Posted by at 3:33 AM

Okay...my comment system has apparently been inoperable for about five months, something which I didn't find out until just tonight, since I never really got that many, and I had no alerts from the system or from readers that anything was wrong. Apparently, a plugin that was installed around that time has been causing the system to display an "entry does not exist" error to anyone who was trying to comment.

The plugins, the CCode and TCode anti-spam modules on Six Apart's siite, have been disabled. Should you wish to comment on any posts, past or current, please feel free to do so, the system is now working again.

- Posted by at 9:52 PM

The site was down for about 10 hours today, in a rather unpleasant excuse for an April Fools joke. Since the company also decided not to have anyone around on their support staff, it was impossible to reach anyone during that time. I suppose when you go low-end on the hosting plans, inefficient service is to be expected, but I thought the idea of that 50% hike they enacted last fall was to prevent this kind of thing. Then again, when I logged on tonight, I got this from the tech help...

Broadcast: [User] has asked "What is my modernbill ID number?"
Tech: Hi,
Tech: How can I help you?

I admit, I was stunned, as I thought I had laid out in pretty simple terms what I needed help with. I also like how the conversation always ends with "is there anything I can help you with?" It's a wonder the company manages to stay in business, although I must say, this has been the first long-term problem I've had in nearly 3 years with them.

Now I get to see whether the company will try to play hardball about this, since per the Terms of Service, a downtime of that magnitude entitles me to the entire $4.95 monthly fee back.

UPDATE: An e-mail came this morning confirming a credit for the monthly fee the next time I have to pay them (which is in July). This means I'll probably renew for another year, if only to get the credit, and because I'm unsure I could get any better deal for under $7 per month.

- Posted by at 12:27 AM

Earlier today, someone on what Sitemeter tells me is an EWTN-assigned IP address typed the following search string - "ewtn a network gone wrong"

Hmm...sounds like someone down there is disgruntled.

- Posted by at 11:10 PM

Yikes! This week has been a killer for me, though that's largely due to my own fault of not getting enough sleep (and I'm not even playing World of Warcraft this semester...amazing how other ways to waste time arise).

I wrote a paper this week on the Letter to Diognetus, one of the oldest extant Christian writings. Although I had trouble staying alert during the class discussion, I don't seem to have taken the same angle as anyone else...which either means I badly misread the document, or just that I had a different take than everybody else.

I'll try excerpting for a blog entry this weekend if I have time, though tomorrow is going to have time blacked out to pay a visit to Pittsburgh to visit the massive relic collection there, and Sunday of course will have Super Bowl fun. As this is Steelers country, it will be a riot if they win and a depressing atmosphere if they don't.

N.B. - Here is the text of the Letter to Diognetus, helpfully the same translation as I used, by Cyril Richardson, originally published in 1953 (I am more than a little annoyed that I paid for a book that was already freely in the public domain - news to pass on to the instructor for the benefit of future students). In my analysis, the thesis of the whole letter is found in the beginning of Chapter 8, "before he came, what man had any knowledge of God at all?" Also, my thesis blithely ignores the critical conclusion that the final 2 chapters were written by someone else - hence allowing me to use the Genesis imagery there to reflect back on preceding material - since my thought is that whoever added them is likely to have meant them to complement the first 10.

- Posted by at 12:10 AM

The Frappr map, which has been around for about 2 months, has just found its way onto my sidebar. It's a good thing I get work done faster than I work on these little things...

Feel free to stick a pin in the map and let me know you exist. I do get all sorts of interesting locations showing up on Sitemeter - a few weeks ago, someone from the IRS showed up looking for information on Fr. Corapi. And someone from Venezuela looking for something quite apart from what I have here. Help make my map as interesting as my Sitemeter.

- Posted by at 12:03 AM

Listening to Beethoven tormented by demons, as envisioned by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, is an interesting way to go about trying to clean up templates, since that's sort of like wrestling with demons. Thankfully, everything seems to look decent now in Firefox. Other browsers are on their own.

Every template got a little face lift at least, and at least all of them are now operating off the same style sheet (I had four previously), and basically readable. Suggestions for further tweaking are welcome.

- Posted by at 3:28 AM

Just when I had the Individual archive almost fully fixed, now Movable Type is acting very weird across the entire system, and most of the archives are down. I hope this isn't a corruption of the database.

UPDATE: This was a server failure.

- Posted by at 2:22 AM

The blog's design is being tinkered with slightly, as is visible on the main page at the moment. The new format reveals the category each post is filed under and should also make it easier to locate my permalinks - they're indicated by "permalink" now instead of the timestamp. The Archives remain a mess as usual, mostly since I've really never tinkered much with them and I still don't know what I'm doing. Those will take however long it takes me to figure out the coding of those pages.

The side panels have been rearranged in a hopefully more logical fashion than before. I also plan on adding at least some of them to my Archive pages, although Movable Type does not seem to like the idea of using the search function on those pages.

New blogs to be linked are Living Catholicism, Fidei Defensor, and Deo Omnis Gloria.

Franciscan University now has a link, as does the website that provides the cross and dragon backgrounds on the site, Lord Kyl's Realm.

Also for your consideration is the web comic Tittivillus, by the same guy who runs Lord Kyl's. Sort of bizarre, sometimes irreverent, but usually funny and definitely better than half of what they print in the Sunday comics these days. This is one of my personal favorites in the series, coming at the end of a Divine Comedy story line.

- Posted by at 11:42 PM

Since I first started using Site Meter over a year ago, there have been 10,000 visits to this blog, most of them of the 0 second variety, though a few brave souls have dared to stay for more than a minute.

The 10,000th visitor was from London, Lambeth in the UK, stayed for 0 seconds, and got here via a blocked referrer. The post they ended up on was this one about Japanese puzzles. Something tells me I wasn't what they were looking for.

- Posted by at 11:06 PM

I've been meaning to do this for some time, but I'm doing a little house cleaning on the blog. A lot of posts have been sitting in some pretty odd categories, particularly the oldest of the bunch. I've created a bunch of new categories for the sake of clarity - right now, these new categories only contain the most ancient of my posts. As of now, the July and August 2004 posts have been reviewed and kicked into the appropriate categories.

New categories so far are Humor, Literature, Philosophy, Western New York, and World. National News may be suppressed, since I only used it for Katrina, and I don't tend to post on the subject much without having it end up in Politics or Society. My goal is primarily to reduce the reliance on the Miscellaneous category, which is where 1 in 5 posts has ended up.

In changes to the links, I've linked to the new St. Blog's Parish Directory, and also rejoined that list. I've also added a few new blogs, Zadok the Roman and The Discernment Dilemma.

- Posted by at 3:05 AM

After switching between lots of options, I've settled on my Advent style for this year. There will be a small wreath in the link bar, along with the purple themed backgrounds. Enjoy!

- Posted by at 7:26 PM

Following a technical gaffe on my part, comments have now been restored.

- Posted by at 11:58 PM

I saw this over on the Curt Jester, and upon checking, found the 5th sentence of my 23rd post too funny not to post this meme and pass it along.

The meme's rules:

1.Go into your archives.
2. Find your 23rd post.
3. Post the fifth sentence (or closest to it).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.
5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.

My 23rd post was entitled Consecration of Virgins, and the 5th sentence of that post happens to be:

Time to get the word out, it'd be nice to have more consecrated virgins than dedicated twits.

As a little incentive to go check out that post, I linked to an example of what I considered dedicated twits.

The hot potato's being passed on to the Angry Twins, Friary Notes, Happy Catholic, Shrine of the Holy Whapping, and Flying Stars.

- Posted by at 12:47 PM

Morristown and Beleaguered TA have been moved to the inactive list, as the former's author is in Iraq and not able to post, and the latter's author has switched over to Centrifugal Farce, which has been added to the list.

Mark Shea returns to the active list, a bit late, since I didn't notice his return about 6 weeks ago.

Kaus Files joins the pundits list again, as he's just too witty not to enjoy.

New to the list is Friary Notes, by Br. Seraphim Beshoner, one of the TORs in Steubenville. While he's seen me before, he wouldn't know me as the author of this blog...yet, anyway.

- Posted by at 4:20 PM

Due to the new installation of Movable Type, the filtering system is brand new and hasn't yet been trained to filter out spam as well as it should. As such, spam has been hitting some entries in the blog. Please bear with the scum until the system can learn how to deal with it.

- Posted by at 1:08 AM

Andy, thankfully over his days as a Beleagured TA, has taken up a new home at Centrifugal Farce. Let me tell you, setting that up had all the makings of a farce, as I spent about 2 hours making a mess of my web server and Movable Type due to a path error on my part. I had actually denied public access to the site for a while. Never doubt the value of COPY/PASTE when dealing with paths.

- Posted by at 12:27 AM

My copy of Movable Type is now licensed, making use of the discount Six Apart offered last month. Hopefully the upgrade will take care of spam issues that have been cropping up of late.

- Posted by at 11:36 AM

Over the next few weeks, I am going to give my archives a bit of a remodeling, which will mainly involve diversifying my topic classification system and also moving posts to new categories as events warrant. The topical archives may be a bit messy until that's done.

- Posted by at 3:50 PM

Reading through my statistics, some interesting things have come up:

- The Old Oligarch is the number one referrer, followed by Technorati.com, which I didn't even know existed.

- "Lourdes Miracles" is the number one search phrase linking to me, even though that page is no longer linked from anywhere on my site. Even more scary, it's the number one link on Yahoo for that phrase as of now. I think I might have the Holy Father to thank for the interest in the topic, but can't figure out why I'm listed first. Disclaimer: The page is a copy of a pamphlet which is orthodox in nature, but distributed by a quasi-schismatic group.

- About 500 hits for the 2 syndication files so far during August.

- Despite consuming 128 MB of bandwidth so far this month, I am still using only .5% of my monthly quota.

- Posted by at 10:53 PM

For anyone who has tried to view my monthly archives and found them a horrendous mess, my apologies. I think I've fixed up all my goofs, so they should look presentable now.

For those who haven't tried to view them before...you never saw this.

- Posted by at 2:58 AM

Yahoo's search engine seems to like my blog a bit more than Google does. On Yahoo a query for the words "justice" and "crusader" in either order will list my blog first among 279,000 matches. While I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, I partly suspect this is because the cached information contains the words "gay rights" in it.

Oddly enough, Google will list the Curt Jester's post about the blog ahead of the blog itself. This is what happens when a non-sentient computer compiles information.

- Posted by at 10:46 PM

This is the 1-year anniversary of me launching my website on an actual host, taking it off the extremely space-limited university space. For anyone who is looking for low cost, quality webhosting, visit Fuitadnet. They have generally been pretty reliable.

In other news, the majority of my space and bandwidth is still unused. I aim to start fixing that this year.

- Posted by at 12:59 AM

Tinkering with web code is always fun. So much fun that I usually don't realize the entire night flies by. With Jeff's help, this blog finally looks ready to go. Certainly better than on July 1, when this looked like a coding disaster from my website's early days (the evidence has been erased).

Those of you wandering over to my main website will probably notice it looks a bit dated, which it is, since I've not made any major updates in a while. However, contributions would be happily accepted, especially in the Catholic and Election areas, since I tend to write new material at a snail's pace.

- Posted by at 5:30 PM