Welcome to my new faith and theology weblog. I’ve been wanting to put this up for a while, and I’m excited to get started!

Many of you reading this are probably already aware of my other blog, “Joey Day : Avocation”:http://joeyday.com, but if you’ve never been there, it may be worth a look. When I started my original blog (it wasn’t titled “Avocation” until recently), I wrote on every subject, but mostly the boring ins and outs of my daily routine. I’ve since refined the subject matter with a focus on tech-related topics.

I used to list prayer requests and talk about spiritual matters as well, but when I changed the subject matter, I also decided to split my “Avocation” from my “Foundation”, and the idea for Joey Day : Foundation was born. I reserved the domain a couple months ago, but I never got around to building it until now.

Stay tuned for more information (I’ll be putting up an Info page similar to the one on my Avocation blog).

[Edit: Because the Theology category was empty, the category and all of it’s sub-categories were not displaying on my sidebar. As a temporary workaround, I’ve categorized this post as Theology to force these categories to display.]

I haven’t made mention of any of the Firefox releases lately, because they’ve all been pretty trivial, but I suppose it’s worth mentioning that “Firefox 0.9.3”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox and “Thunderbird 0.7.3”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird have been released.

Get ’em while they’re hot, folks.

I always thought it would be fun to administrate a high-traffic website. Now that I have one, I’m not so sure anymore.

The “Homestar Runner Wiki”:http://www.hrwiki.org has been getting more and more popular over the past three months, going from 8.38 GB of bandwidth in April to 15.39 in June and 25.96 in July. It continually breaks it’s own records, acheiving 1.34 GB in a single day on August 3 (the previous record was 1.07 on July 20). Don’t take my opening statement too seriously. I really do love administrating such a fun site; it’s exciting to see the numbers jump like they have.

Unfortunately, because of the high traffic, we’ve been experiencing a lot of slowing and time-outs. On Monday, August 2, the site was down for almost half an hour because the server had to reboot, and it was simply timing out for most of the day (at least whenever I tried). I think the real killer was the new “Peasant’s Quest”:http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html game. Check out our top 10 search engine phrases for the month so far:

# peasant s quest (1535 searches, 11.3%)
# homestar runner (1167 searches, 8.6%)
# homestar wiki (876 searches, 6.4%)
# homestar runner wiki (514 searches, 3.7%)
# hrwiki (422 searches, 3.1%)
# peasant s quest faq (375 searches, 2.7%)
# peasant s quest guide (349 searches, 2.5%)
# peasant s quest walkthrough (294 searches, 2.1%)
# homestar (247 searches, 1.8%)
# homestarrunner wiki (241 searches, 1.7%)

Funny thing is, bandwidth isn’t the issue anymore. Recently, we’ve run into an entirely different brick wall: system resources. Due to scalability issues with “’Tavi”:http://tavi.sourceforge.net, the engine our wiki runs off of, we’ve finally made the decision to switch to “MediaWiki”:http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net. MediaWiki is the software used by the ever-popular “Wikipedia”:http://www.wikipedia.org. It should be much more suited to a high-traffic site, and will give us several features we’ve been wanting for a while, including better user management and category functions. In retrospect, I should’ve started out with a more trusted wiki engine, but I threw this all together quite haphazardly one slow October day last year, and I didn’t exactly have a broad vision for the future.

In the next few days we’ll probably open a pledge drive, too. Since mySQL is primarily what’s overworking the CPU (“some details”:http://www.cool-stu.com/archives/000015.html), we need to move our database to a dedicated server. Once we’ve taken care of the migration to MediaWiki and the new mySQL server, I think we’ll be in business for quite some time.

In the meantime, things are going to get a little bumpy…

“Disney”:http://www.disney.com made an exciting announcement today. Well, you might not think it’s exciting, but everyone here at “ContentWatch”:http://www.contentwatch.com is ecstatic.

In a press conference this morning, Disney unveiled the new “[“Disney Dream Desk”:http://www.compusa.com/promos/disneydreamdesk/default.asp]”. It’s intended for kids, and carries a low price tag for budget-conscious parents. The various parts are styled to look like Mickey Mouse, though in a surprising — but pleasant — shade of baby blue. The Dream Desk will be available September 12 in “CompUSA”:http://www.compusa.com stores across the nation.

The exciting thing for us is that every one of these computers comes with our ContentProtect Home Suite under the hood. Keep in mind, I’m not an official spokesman for the company (I’m just a lowly customer support representative), but I know ContentWatch couldn’t be happier about this partnership with Disney. We feel honored to have been selected by such a prestigious company to offer peace of mind to their customers.

# “Mickey not included, but Disney’s new PC has a mouse”:http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-08-05-disney-pc_x.htm
# “Disney Magic Comes to the Desktop…”:http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/040805/nyth024_1.html

I recently discovered through “The Inquirer”:http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=17382 that the IE development team has started a new “IE Blog”:http://blogs.msdn.com/ie.

Is this some kind of horrible joke? Do these guys actually believe that “IE is the best browser in the world”:http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2004/07/21/190747.aspx? I’m having trouble deciding which is more funny: the serious (but totally off-base) posts by the developers themselves, or the comments left by readers. The comments section is basically one big ad for Firefox!