If any of you are experiencing technical issues with this website, please leave a comment on this post.

I just tested this site on a Windows 2000 machine with Internet Explorer 6, and none of the media shows up. I used to have access to a different Win2000/IE 6 machine, and everything showed up fine.

This site complies with the W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional standard. Your best bet is to use a browser that’s actually standards compliant, such as Firefox. I know some of you read this site at work (maybe not such a good idea!), so you don’t have control over which browser is on your machine. If there’s something obvious I can fix, I’ll do so, but I’m not going to break the site for the people who follow the rules just so I can accommodate Microsoft.

You’ll notice a link to the Atheist Blogroll in the sidebar. Most sites that have this will list at least some of the blogs from that blogroll in their sidebar. I don’t, because that forces your browser to run off to a different server to fetch stuff. That slows down page loading times. The code for that also uses javascript. I try to use as little javascript on this site as possible.

A bunch of blogs are listing the entire Atheist Blogroll in a post. This helps the listed sites with their search engine rankings and Technorati authority. I thought I would help out here as well. Herewith is the entire list. Scan through it and see if any of the titles sound interesting and give them a look.

As you can see, I changed the header to the blog. Doing so managed to break a couple of other things, which I hope to have fixed soon. Anyway, if you have a reaction to the new design (either positive or negative), you can leave a comment on this post.

Firefox users: For some reason, the very first time you come here, the header is just a blue bar. If you reload the page, the header appears. I don’t know how to fix this! It’s probably some weird bug in WordPress that only Firefox is sensitive to. Anyone have any suggestions?

I’ve been feeling very restrained by the width of this blog template. I had only 450 pixels for the main content, which continually hampered any graphics I wanted to post.

I’ve now widened the main column to 500 pixels. It was supposed to make the overall blog width go from 760 to 810 pixels, but apparently it just decided to squeeze everything together more. (WordPress and CSS are more confusing than they should be.) One of these days, I’m going to have this whole thing redesigned, but I have bigger problems in my life right now. That means we get to live with this for a while. I hope the new look is acceptable for now.

If you encounter any problems with the new layout, please let me know. You can either post a public comment here or send a private comment via the Contact link in the sidebar.

(BTW, if anybody knows how to move the faint gray background of my sidebar a few pixels to the right, please let me know. I checked all the files that I normally tamper with, and I couldn’t figure out where its location and width are defined. I’m using the standard Kubrick template.)

I’m going to start participating in The Carnival of the Godless. Number 70 is up this weekend over at Friendly Atheist. This is a good way to drum up new readers. This, of course, is all part of our master plan to turn more people away from Christ and toward Atheism (Atheism, after all is just an anagram of our secret agenda: “Ah Smite”. Getting people smote is what this is all about!).

Reading the Carnival of the Godless is also a good way of finding some excellent blogs. For example, it pointed me to The Greenbelt, who has a post about The Family Circus. I’ve always found that comic to be disturbing on many levels.

For example, I once had a dream that I was reading the comics page in my local newspaper. After reading such brilliant strips as The Lockhorns and Cathy, I then turned to Garfield, which was very funny (That’s right, only in your dreams is Garfield ever funny.).

Finally, I got to The Family Circus. I had been saving it until last, for it was my favorite! It’s the dessert of the comics page! Oh, Family Circus! The anticipation is killing me! I felt like the dog with the Milk Bone on his nose, trembling with discipline and desire, just waiting for his owner to give the command, so that he might snatch it and devour its milky goodness! (Milk Bones do have milky goodness, don’t they? I can think of another bone that gives milk, which leads me to…)

At last, I allowed my gaze to fall upon the Holiest of Holies. I rejected Indiana Jones’ plea to not gaze upon the contents of the Ark. I gleefully ignored Lot’s command not to turn around and look upon the city. I finally allowed my eyes to fall upon The Family Circus! With all proper reverence, I read the strip: It depicted Billy giving his father a blow job.

I don’t know if that dream says more about me or The Family Circus.

Anyway, head on over to The Carnival of the Godless, then be sure to visit The Greenbelt. I’m sure you’ll find his description of a real Family Circus to be even more distressing than my dreamworld version.

This is just a quick note to say that I am off to the Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. I’ll be back Monday night. I hope to have a new post no later than Tuesday.

If I met you at TAM5 and this is your first visit, welcome to the Bay of Fundie. Look around. Read a few articles. I hope you enjoy the place.

Happy 2007! 2006 was a mixed bag, but I guess it was better than the several years preceding it. The public at large finally woke up to the Iraq war. The mid-term election gives us some hope of things finally turning around. Remember, though, we need to watch the Democrats closely, too. They need to deliver on their promises of reform.

In the spirit of reform, there is a big change afoot here at the Bay of Fundie. Commenting has just gotten easier!

Until now, I have required that you register and log in before you could post comments. This was because the spammers are incredibly persistent. The problem is that most people consider registering at yet another website to be a royal pain. I’ve installed a spam filter, so let’s all find out how well it works.

Starting today, I have turned off the registration requirement. You can still register and log in if you want, but there is not really any benefit to doing so.

From now on (or until the spammers beat the system), in order to leave a comment, all you have to do is click on the comment link at the bottom of every post, fill in you name and email address, then add your comment.

Your email address will not be published. It’s just part of the security system. I will never use the address to spam you. I will never give it to anyone else.

I don’t believe that the spam filter has a high false-positive rate (i.e., flags normal posts as spam). As far as I know, the thing works fairly quickly. If your comment does not appear within one minute, maybe it got flagged.

If you have any problems posting a comment, use the contact link in the sidebar to send me a note.

Those of you running Internet Explorer 6 will have noticed that the header on this page is screwy. This web site is (usually) 100% compliant with W3C XHTML standards. Your software is buggy, not this site. Microsoft has released IE7. I haven’t used it, so I don’t know if that adheres to W3C standards, either. I wouldn’t be surprised if it did’t.

You should really switch to a better browser. You’ll be glad you did. Your best bet is probably Firefox. Check that one out first. I like Camino, which is a relative of Firefox with a lean, clean interface, but it’s occasionally sluggish.