The mailinglist script is finally done, and it’s available for download / installation / use along with my login script, blogger script, and dnsupdate script.  You can get them all at the top of the software page.

They’re all pretty full-featured, all have complete installation and usage instructions, and all have been tested by me, right here on my own site.  They are the partial culmination of countless hours of perl coding.

There are 2 big projects that are still in the works: making my visitorlog/stats script portable and freely available, and writing a guide for how to run a website on your own computer.  The main purpose of the guide will be to allow people to easily make webpages from their digital photo sets; I’ve set up my mom’s computer to do just that, and her and my younger brother are using the scripts that I wrote for it.  As I was developing that system, I realized that it too should be written portably, and documented, so that I can redeploy it for other family/friends and so that I can make the documentation available to anyone else who wants to do the same thing.

You can listen to the entire new Dashboard Confessional album on mtv.com.  (The album isn’t actually being released until next week.)  It’s sad, in a way, to see someone who is one of the biggest indie rock heroes being endorsed/distributed by the biggest pop media outlet there is.  But Chris is an amazing musician, and he’ll reach a huge audience and achieve lots of monetary success this way, and for that I’m certainly glad.

Of course, the emo/indie "scene kids" will throw their hissy-fits and call Chris a sellout because he’s successful, and because they’re bitter that they have to share him with other people now.  That mentality is so childish and ridiculous, it’s barely worth addressing... but then again, so is the very act of achieving personal identity by being part of a "scene."

The new album is good.  Really good.  The stylistic progression from The Drowning EP, through the 2 full-length releases, and then the Summers’ Kiss and So Impossible EPs, is clear.  The scenesters will deny that, because they’re upset that he didn’t make another album that’s just like The Places, just like they were upset that The Get Up Kids didn’t make another album identical to Something to Write Home About.

But those people don’t matter.  The music matters.  A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar is good music.

Yesterday, there were two strange new stories about dogs, and today there was a third.

In a park in New York City, a chihuahua was snatched up by a hawk, who apparently mistook it for a rat.  (The city had brought in 5 brown hawks in order to help control the sprawling rat population.)  But the tiny dog was on a leash, and it’s owner was able to get it back from the bird.  How embarrassing.  The moral of the story: get a real dog.  As in, one that grows to be bigger than a rat.  And that can defend itself against birds.

Then, in St. Louis, an animal center was euthanizing a few unwanted/unclaimed dogs, as they do every day.  They put them into a gas chamber and fill it with carbon monoxide.  But when they opened the door afterwards, one dog stood with its tail wagging amongst the bodies of the other dogs who’d given up.

Finally, this morning on Fox News, there was a story about a dog who got hit by a car, and then walked to the vet.  I haven’t yet found a link to that one.

Man, I’ve been getting some good MOTDs on my Slackware system lately... here’s one I just got:

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first.

I just read this on prayer at a devotional a friend referred me to:

We must press on in prayer. God hears our prayers, but sometimes it seems He His long in answering them. Sometimes He doesn’t answer them as we would like, but this is no excuse not to pray. As Christians we pray. It is what we do and the blessings that are ours through prayer we probably will not know until glory.

by Tim@cfdevotionals.org
8/4/03

I just killed 62 flies.  In my house.  It took nearly an hour.  The flies (and mosquitoes) are out of control this summer; I think that’s because it rained almost every day for 3 straight months from April to June.  There aren’t usually many in the house, but yesterday there were little kids over here who kept leaving the door open.  Today they were driving me crazy, so I had to take care of them.

It’s my job to have something to say.

They pay me to provide words that help make sense of that which troubles the American soul. But in this moment of airless shock when hot tears sting disbelieving eyes, the only thing I can find to say, the only words that seem to fit, must be addressed to the unknown author of this suffering.

You monster. You beast. You unspeakable bastard.

What lesson did you hope to teach us by your coward’s attack on our World Trade Center, our Pentagon, us? What was it you hoped we would learn? Whatever it was, please know that you failed.

Did you want us to respect your cause? You just damned your cause.

Did you want to make us fear? You just steeled our resolve.

Did you want to tear us apart? You just brought us together.

Let me tell you about my people. We are a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless. We’re frivolous, yes, capable of expending tremendous emotional energy on pop cultural minutiae - a singer’s revealing dress, a ball team’s misfortune, a cartoon mouse. We’re wealthy, too, spoiled by the ready availability of trinkets and material goods, and maybe because of that, we walk through life with a certain sense of blithe entitlement. We are fundamentally decent, though - peace-loving and compassionate. We struggle to know the right thing and to do it. And we are, the overwhelming majority of us, people of faith, believers in a just and loving God.

Some people - you, perhaps - think that any or all of this makes us weak. You’re mistaken. We are not weak. Indeed, we are strong in ways that cannot be measured by arsenals.

IN PAIN

Yes, we’re in pain now. We are in mourning and we are in shock. We’re still grappling with the unreality of the awful thing you did, still working to make ourselves understand that this isn’t a special effect from some Hollywood blockbuster, isn’t the plot development from a Tom Clancy novel. Both in terms of the awful scope of their ambition and the probable final death toll, your attacks are likely to go down as the worst acts of terrorism in the history of the United States and, probably, the history of the world. You’ve bloodied us as we have never been bloodied before.

But there’s a gulf of difference between making us bloody and making us fall. This is the lesson Japan was taught to its bitter sorrow the last time anyone hit us this hard, the last time anyone brought us such abrupt and monumental pain. When roused, we are righteous in our outrage, terrible in our force. When provoked by this level of barbarism, we will bear any suffering, pay any cost, go to any length, in the pursuit of justice.

I tell you this without fear of contradiction. I know my people, as you, I think, do not. What I know reassures me. It also causes me to tremble with dread of the future.

In the days to come, there will be recrimination and accusation, fingers pointing to determine whose failure allowed this to happen and what can be done to prevent it from happening again. There will be heightened security, misguided talk of revoking basic freedoms. We’ll go forward from this moment sobered, chastened, sad. But determined, too. Unimaginably determined.

THE STEEL IN US

You see, the steel in us is not always readily apparent. That aspect of our character is seldom understood by people who don’t know us well. On this day, the family’s bickering is put on hold.

As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish.

So I ask again: What was it you hoped to teach us? It occurs to me that maybe you just wanted us to know the depths of your hatred. If that’s the case, consider the message received. And take this message in exchange: You don’t know my people. You don’t know what we’re capable of. You don’t know what you just started.

But you’re about to learn.

-Leonard Pitts Jr.
"September 12, 2001: We’ll Go Forward From This Moment"
The Miami Herald

Help me out, please?

I’m having a little problem with people on Xanga stealing bandwidth from my servers.  They’re using my photos and music streams in their blogs, by direct-linking them from my server.  The result is that people viewing their blogs think that the photo/music is actually a part of their blog, when in fact it’s coming directly from my server.

To combat this, I’ve set up some access restrictions on my photos and MP3 downloads, and I’ve taken all mp3 streams offline -- hopefully only temporarily.  But I want to make sure that people who are actually on my website can still access my content.

So if you would:

1) Go to the music page and scroll down to either the Christian bands section, or the Non-Christian bands section, and click on a few of the download links.  Once they download, play them to make sure you got them OK.

2) Go to the photos page and click on one of the photo sets; once it loads, click on a few of the thumbnails and make sure that the larger images show up for you.  Finally, click on one of the larger images, to get the full-size (really huge) image, to make sure that loads ok (though it’ll be really slow).

If you’ve got a few minutes to try those things, post a reply here and let me know if they worked for you.  Thanks a bunch.

(PS - for the curious, if you’re using Apache (and you ought to be ashamed if you’re using any other web server), it’s easy to set up access restrictions for a single website.  Just put this into an htaccess file in your webserver’s root directory:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mysite.com/.*$
RewriteRule .* not-so-fast.htm

Then just make sure that you have either Options FollowSymLinks or Options SymLinksIfOwnerMatch inside the <Directory /serverroot></Directory> section in your httpd.conf file.  This will detect any requests for pages coming from somewhere other than mysite.com, and redirect such requests to not-so-fast.htm, in which you can explain the deal.)

Here’s my good idea of the day:

I sit at a desk for 8 hours a day at work.  (Well, except for meetings and stuff, but most of the time I’m here.)  Why do I do that?  It’s because I use a computer to do my work, and a computer needs a desk.

Since technology has advanced to the point where notebook computers and wireless networking are cheap and commonplace, I submit that we should all have the option to work outside if we’d like to.  That’s the kind of thing that would improve employee morale and loyalty by about 1000%, especially if you currently work in the center of a giant building with no windows, so you don’t see the light of day at all.

Just when I think I’m going to have a night where I get some stuff done, I come across something like this.  A guy built his own custom-designed non-traditional airplane -- with his wife, no less -- and flew it across the country.  That is so cool on so many levels.  Reading his log of the trip was really interesting and exciting.  (I found the site through Bill Whittle’s page.)

That’s the little bugger that woke me up at some obscene hour this morning.  It’s the tiny piezo speaker from the UPS that powers my computers when the electricity goes out.  Unfortunately, when that happens, it makes an obnoxious beeping noise to tell you that the electricity is out.  So around 1:30am, that’s what happened.

Not anymore.  I desoldered that punk from the circuit board inside the UPS.  So next time the power goes out for 4 or 6 or 8 hours (which will be any day now, I’ve no doubt), the UPS can die a nice, silent death.

Soon I’m just gonna build one of these guys for all my energy needs.  Two megawatts of free and tasty solar power.  Projects like that are so exciting.  There is so much free energy hitting the earth every second from the sun, it’s ridiculous, and bunches more free energy just blowing around in the wind.  I’m not anything like an environmentalist, it’s just that all this other energy is free, all around us, and it’s frustrating to know that the technology isn’t yet there to utilize it to its full potential.

So today my car was in the shop for regularly scheduled maintenance.  The 60,000 mile one, to be exact, except I forgot about it before and Golfy now has 69,000 miles on him.  So I suppose it’s my fault that my brake rotors needed replacing, though I can’t say I’m entirely convinced that before those 9000 miles, only the pads were wearing.  In any case, it cost me $700 for parts and labor for all 4 wheels.  Which is a little steep, since it’s a Porsche/Audi/VW dealer and not just a regular old body shop, but I asked around and most people were saying that $500-$600 is normal for new brakes on all 4 wheels.  And everyone seems to agree that it’s amazing that I got 69,000 miles out of a single set of pads/rotors.  (And my office mate suggested that I ask if they can grind the rotors down, instead of replacing them, but the VW repair guy told me that on most new cars, they make the pads very thin -- "just over spec," so that once they’re worn, they’re too thin to grind down because there just isn’t enough material left, and they also start to warp because they heat up more when they’re that thin.  He said they actually don’t even have a machine to do that anymore.)

Let me just say that VW design engineers are amazing, but VW repair guys are as incompetent as most auto repair guys seem to be.  The last time I took my car in for maintenance, they broke my stereo, and this time, as my mom was driving it home from the dealer (my mom took it in, so I didn’t have to take a day off of work), the "check engine" light came on!  Ridiculous.

So I drove my mom’s Chevy Impala today.  It’s a pretty nice car.  With a sunroof.  But I can’t stand driving a car without tight steering and without ~sports suspension.  The Impala drives a lot like the Lincoln Town Car we used to have -- it drives like a "luxury car."  It feels like you’re floating when you drive it.  It’s like the interface between the gas pedal and the engine, and the interface between the wheels and the chassis, are made of Jello.  You know there’s some sort of interface there, but you can’t quite figure it out; it’s not anything like real-time nor direct.  You feel completely isolated from the road, and have very little sense of control.

Oh, and it’s an automatic.  It was all I could do to stay awake while driving it.  It’s just so boring.  Fortunately, if you actually press the gas pedal hard, the car goes into a brief convulsion as the engine downshifts, and you get jolted around in your seat as you nearly swerve off the road... so that kept me mostly awake.

I just watched 25th hour last night, and just read your recent post about it.  I think the last ten minutes was Monty imagining how his life could turn out, as his dad was describing it.  Monty never gave his dad the word to turn west, so I got the impression that the last scene was them still on their way to prison.

I spoke too soon.  Although the power goes out at least a few times a month here, it’s usually only for a few minutes.  Today, however, it was out for over 8 hours.  My trusty Linux server’s uptime was killed at 72 days.  Sigh.

On top of that, Crapcast Comcast has been particularly crappy the past few days; we’ve had a handful of multiple-hour interruptions in our internet access.  I’ve been trying to get my login and mailinglist scripts finished and online, but every time I try, something just gets in the way.  Tonight, however, is looking promising.

As an aside, the other day at work I realized that Fritos are amazing.  They’re not my favorite snack of all time or anything.  But they are really good, and what’s amazing about them is that they manage to be really good with only these ingredients:

corn
corn oil
salt

Just 3 ingredients, and 2 of them are the same thing.  That is spectacular.  You rarely if ever see that kind of thing nowadays, especially on snack foods like that.

There is a new Dashboard album coming out soon.  I can’t wait.  But there’s a new version of the song "Hands Down" on it, which you can hear by clicking a link on the news page... and it’s awful.  The original version on the So Impossible EP is 9000 times better.  Still, I can’t wait to hear the actual NEW new stuff.

There is also a new Thrice album that just came out, and it’s less than $10 at Best Buy.  I am all over that one day after work this week.  Thrice even did a split with Thursday, who also has a new album coming out (but not for a couple months yet), which is super cool.  Thrice are amazing, and Thursday is just about my favorite band ever.

I have songs by all three of these bands on my music page, too, so check them out.  Thrice == hard punk / metal, Thursday == hard emocore, Dashboard Confessional == super emo 9000 of prettiness acoustic love.

A lot of people have this notion that leasing a car is just A Bad Idea, because at the end of the lease, you "have nothing" since you give the car back.  They seem to have been programmed to believe this, without ever having actually thought about whether it’s true.  It’s not true.

Lease payments are much lower than finance payments; leasing is sometimes referred to as "paying for only what you use" of the car, whereas when you make finance payments, you’re paying for the entire price of the car.

It only takes 3 seconds to explain why it’s a lie that the leaser "has nothing" at the end of the lease.  Watch.

Two people each have $20,000 and have their eye on the same $20,000 car.  The first guy leases the car for 4 years, and the sum of the lease payments and the down-payment is $12,000.  The second guy finances the car for 4 years, and the sum of the finance payments and down-payment is $20,000 -- the full price of the car.

What do they each have at the end of 4 years?  The first guy has $8000 in cash, and the second guy has a car that he hopes will be worth $8000 (but in practice it’s rarely ever worth that full amount).

Not only does the leaser have much more than "nothing," he usually has more than the guy who actually bought the car, because the vast majority of cars don’t hold their value very well over time.

When I first moved to college 3 years ago, my younger brother (well, only 2 years younger) moved into my room at home.  Which was really stinky, because I spend the summers at home, and because his room is tiny -- literally half the size of mine.  So for the past 2 summers, and now this summer, I’ve been in his room, and I have way more stuff than he does... computers, electronics, tools, bike stuff, books, camping/hiking gear, photo and camera gear, not to mention clothes and shoes and boots... so that tiny room is way over-packed.

Well, my brother recently got an apartment a few miles away, in town, near the skate shop he owns.  So this weekend, I reclaimed my room.  It feels so much better to actually have a little bit of space to move around, and plus his room is just really depressing.  Also, his room gets ridiculously hot in the summer (and we don’t have air conditioning), but my room doesn’t, because it’s in the back of the house and is shaded by trees.

So, I didn’t get done any of the 2 or 3 programming projects that I planned to, but that’s OK.  The next ~7 weeks of the summer will be way better being in my room again.  But I do hope to get one of those projects done in the next couple days, because someone is waiting for it.

Also, last Thursday I biked a 6.4 mile loop from my house, onto some back-roads, and back a different way to my house.  I plan on doing it every day, so I get into a little better shape, so that when I go mountain biking I’m not so easily worn out.  In the 4 days I’ve done it, I’ve gone from 30 minutes down to 28 minutes, or about 12.5 MPH to about 13.8 MPH average.  I hope to bring it down to 20 minutes / 18 MPH.

This is one of the most interesting lyrics I’ve heard in a long time:

Again last night I had that strange dream,
where everything was exactly how it seemed...
No concerns about the world getting warmer,
people thought that they were just being rewarded,
For treating others as they’d like to be treated...
for obeying stop signs and curing diseases...
for mailing letters with the address of the sender...
Now we can swim any day in November.

- The Postal Service, "Sleeping In"

Notice anything interesting about that photo?  Ok, besides the fact that the computer is really dusty, and the carpet is a sick brown/puke-green type color?

The computer is on, but it’s unplugged.  Well... unplugged from the wall, anyway.  The black box is a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) -- a "battery backup."  It’s basically a big battery with enough juice to power a computer for 20 or 30 minutes.  A simple idea, really, but it’s so super neato.  Power outages (short ones, anyway) are so fun when I’ve got this guy on my side.

Anyway, that little box is my Shuttle SV25 computer.  He’s been up for 69 days without a reboot (I don’t suppose I need to mention that it runs Linux and not Windows), and I didn’t want to shut him off just because I’m moving him into a different room.  So... I didn’t  : )

The SV25 is my webserver, among other things.  He’s where all my music is served from, and my photos (but only the full-size ones) too.  So when you’re downloading music or any of those giant photos, you’re connecting right to him.  Say hello!

Today at work, there were two rather fantastic statements that are quoteworthy:

"These things are so good for you."
- Mark, before biting into one of the Krispy Kreme doughnuts that got passed into our meeting

"Physics is back!"
- Clay, in response to the fact that silicon microprocessor technology is becoming increasingly sensitive to gamma rays and sun spots

Some other random fun stuff... I’m #1 on Google for 1 farad capacitor +fun with.  It’s seriously scary that someone out there is searching for stuff like that.

Finally, Desperately Seeking Scandal over at Cox and Forkum... hilarious, but sadly, completely true.

Last night at the grocery store, I saw and heard some Russian people speaking Russian.  All of a sudden, I really missed Konst and Dima and our fantastic house at Penn State.  In some ways, I really can’t wait to go back to school.

In other news, this morning I saw what is quite possibly the dumbest bumper sticker of all time.  It said, "Listen to the Earth."

My friend Steve helped me out with my visitor log script, and it should be pretty robust now.  The problem with the double-logging appears to have been the result of a visitor hitting a page at nodivisions.com and then another at www.nodivisions.com.  This resulted in 2 different ID cookies being created, since cookies belong to a particular host, and strictly speaking nodivisions.com is a different host than www.nodivisions.com (although they resolve identically).  The quick and easy fix for that was to redirect anyone visiting www.nodivisions.com to nodivisions.com; you should now see the www disappear from the address bar if you try to visit that way.

Steve also reminded me of the fact that cookie-based logging is subject to sabotage, since a person can simply delete their cookies at will anytime.  Argh... other than that, it’s an incredibly simple and clean solution.  But alas, I’m back to logging the way I used to (partially), which is based on a combination of a user cookie and some other less dynamic characteristics of the client.  We’ll see how it fares.

Slow posting here.  It’s been a while, I’ve been busy.  Or lazy.

Last week, I went mountain biking in French Creek state park with Chris and Josh.  Since my bike has no suspension, and they both have full-suspension bikes, they each offered to let me ride theirs for a while.  Well, that only lasted about 10 minutes, because that was as long as they could stand to ride mine!  (It’s really, really rocky in French Creek, and pretty much everywhere around here, sadly... and going down rocky hills really hurts your arms and wrists and back, if you don’t have any suspension.  And going up hills... don’t even get me started.)

But 10 minutes was all it took for me.  I’m hooked.  I’m getting an FS bike, and soon.  I’ve had my Trek 950 for 6 or 7 years now, and it’s been a great bike, but I’ve done a ton more road-riding than mountain biking.  And it did OK on the mountains too, but now that FS has become affordable, I’m there.

After biking, Chris and I watched the movie Phone Booth.  It was better than I thought it would be, but still pretty odd and not entirely satisfying.  After seeing previews a while ago, I thought "I wonder how they’re going to manage to make an entire movie in a phone booth interesting."  But it was.  Still, I wasn’t thrilled about the ending.  Oh, and just about every other word was an expletive.  That was rather put-offish.

Later, I introduced Chris to Strong Bad.  Have I mentioned that your life is incomplete without a weekly (daily?) dose of Strong Bad?

Anyway, Sunday I went mountain biking with Rolly in Wissahickon park, within Fairmount Park, in Philly.  It was super.  It was rocky too -- I went over the handlebars once, but recovered nicely -- but not nearly as bad as French Creek.  After biking about 6 miles out, we rode down off the mountain onto "Forbidden Drive," aka Wissahickon Drive, and took that back.  That drive is the place to be... mad peoples all over.

So, I definitely want to get an FS bike and start biking a lot more.  I wish I knew some people in State College who were into biking like I am.

Oh, on the way to church Sunday, I realized that The Postal Service is totally Volkswagen music.  Sunny Sunday morning, windows down, weird happy "almost da-da-da" music on the stereo... it could have been a VW commercial.

All bibles contain the substance of the following statement at 1 John 5: 7:
"And there are three that bear witness in earth: the spirit, and the water, and the blood: and these three agree in one."

Some bibles precede this with a controversial text known as the Comma Johanneum that reads:
"For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one."

Did John write these words?

--------------------------------------------------------------

Thanks Anthony for the references in support of the Comma I must confess I’ve never previously had to investigate it quite this thoroughly! To recap, you quoted the following sources:

1) 200 - Tertullian quotes the verse (Gill, "An exposition of the NT", Vol 2, pp. 907-8)
2) 250 - Cyprian, who writes, "And again concerning the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit it is written: ’and the Three are One’" (Vienna, vol. iii, p. 215)
3) 350 - Priscillian cites the verse (Vienna, vol. xviii, p. 6)
4) 350 - Idacius Clarus cites the verse (MPL, vol. 62, col. 359)
5) 350 - Athanasius cites the verse (Gill)
6) 415 - Council of Carthage appeals to the verse as a basic text proving a fundamental doctrine when contending with the Arians (Ruckman, "History of the NT Church", Vol. I, p. 146)
[numerous African and later references omitted]

---------------------------------------------------------------

TERTULLIAN
John Gill (1697-1771) said
"in the middle, of the "third" century, about the year 250; [it] is referred to by Tertullian {c} about, the year 200;"
Tertullian (160-220) is often credited with being the first to formulate the CONCEPT of the Trinity, though Theophilus of Antioch was the first to use the word ’trias’ (translated into Latin as ’trinitas’) in 180AD. However, crucially, Tertullian never ascribed the Comma to John. In his definitive statement on this matter, Against Praxeas, he marshalls the assistance of 332 scriptures that bear on the Trinity doctrine without any reference to a passage that would absolutely have nailed his argument – why? 
Tertullian’s writings seem to be the first step toward the Trinity doctrine rather than a summation of the Trinity as formulised by Athanasius; certainly they differ at key points. Can you find any reputable reference to the effect that Tertullian believed John wrote the Comma? Gill seems to be out on a limb here.

CYPRIAN (De catholicae ecclesiae unitate 6)
Cyprian did at least quote 1 John 5: 7 (the spirit, the water and blood being in agreement) and APPLIED this as a metaphor for the Trinity. Crucially again, a careful reading shows that his quotation of John’s words omits the disputed text.
"Since the statement about the Trinity in the Comma is quite clear (“the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit”), and since Cyprian does not quote that part of the text, this in the least does not afford proof that he knew of such wording. One would expect him to quote the exact wording of the text, if its meaning were plain. That he does not do so indicates that a Trinitarian interpretation was superimposed on the text by Cyprian."
Catholic Encylopedia: "The little that can be extracted from St. Cyprian on the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation is correct, judged by later standards."

PRISCILLIAN
The earliest evidence [of the Johanine Comma] comes from a MS. of Priscillianist provenance discovered by G. Schepss at Wurzburg 1885. Later the insertion is found in African authors. It would thus seem to have originated in N. Africa or Spain and to have found its way into the Latin Bibles used in those districts (both Old Latin and Vulgate), possibly under the stress of Arian persecution. It is absent from St. Jerome’s original text of the Vulgate."
The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, Edited by F.L.Cross, Oxford University Press, reprint of 1963.

"The Comma Joanneum, 5:7-8 of the Vg. is missing in all Gk MSS except four later MSS and in the Oriental versions. It is quoted by no Church father before Priscillian (380). There is no doubt that it is a gloss on the preceding lines, probably added in Africa or the Iberian peninsula."
John L. McKenzie, S.J., Dictionary of the Bible, The Bruce Publishing Company, 1965, p.445.

"[v]8. The famous interpolation after ’three witnesses’ is not printed even in RSVn, and rightly. It cites the heavenly testimony of the Father, the logos, and the Holy Spirit, but is never used in the early trinitarian controversies. No repectable Greek MS contains it. Appearing first in a late 4th cent. Latin text, it entered the Vulgate and finally the NT of Erasmus."
Peake’s Commentary on the Bible, edtors M.Black and H.H.Rowley, reprint of 1964, p.1038

"[1 John]5:7; This verse has not been found in Greek in any manuscript in or out of the New Testament earlier than the thirteenth century. It does not appear in any Greek manuscript of I John before the fifteenth century, when one cursive has it; one from the sixteenth also contains the reading. These are the only Greek manuscripts of the New Testament in which it has ever been found. But it occurs in no ancient Greek manuscript of Greek Christian writers or any of the oriental versions. its chief support is in two Old Latin manuscripts of the sixth and eighth centuries and in some manuscripts of the Latin Vulgate, but not the oldest ones. Erasmus did not include it in his first edition to the New Testament in Greek (1516) nor in his second (1519). When criticized for the omission, he rashly said that if anyone could show him a Greek manuscript containing the passage he would insert it, and the sixteenth century Codex Mantifortianus containing it was brought to his attention. He felt obliged to include the reading in his third edition (1525). From Tyndale the verse found its way into the King James Version. It is universally discredited by Greek scholars and editors of the Greek text of the New Testament."
Edgar J. Goodspeed, The Goodspeed Parallel New Testament, p. 557.

Metzger has an excellent book tracing the origin of the Comma Johanneum. Michael Maynard has another that takes the opposite view. However, they broadly agree on the following facts:

• No-one within 150 years of Jesus’ death even refers to the CONCEPT of the Trinity.
• In almost 300 years prior to Priscillian hundreds of writers quote 1 John 5: 7 without referring to the words above.
• In the same period, the text is not once clearly attributed to John.
• No apologist for the Trinity prior to Priscillian ever cites the passage, despite it being the clearest and most explicit statement of the doctrine - including Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine.
• The passage is absent from the manuscripts of all ancient versions (Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopic, Arabic, Slavonic), except the Latin; and it is not found (a) in the Old Latin in its early form (Tertullian Cyprian Augustine), or in the Vulgate (b) as issued by Jerome ... or (c) as revised by Alcuin...
• The Comma Johanneum doesn’t appear in any Greek manuscript for nearly 1500 years.
• The earliest instance of the passage being quoted as a part of the actual text of the Epistle is in a fourth century Latin treatise entitled Liber Apologeticus (chap. 4), attributed either to Priscillian or to his follower Bishop Instantius.
• In the 200 years following the publication of the King James version, there was a practically universal recognition of the origin of the Comma Johanneum as more ancient manuscripts came to light. During the 18th and 19th Centuries, only the staunchest defender of the Trinity doctrine, the Roman Catholic Church, held that it was genuine. Eventually, they too were forced to acknowledge that John did not write the passage.
• With the exception of the Catholic Douay bible, practically all translations omit the passage, or relegate it to a footnote.

As Daniel Wallace concludes: "All the historical data point in one of two directions: (1) This reading was a gloss added by Latin patristic writers whose interpretive zeal caused them to insert these words into Holy Writ; or (2) this interpretation was a gloss, written in the margins of some Latin MSS, probably sometime between 250 and 350, that got incorporated into the text by a scribe who was not sure whether it was a comment on scripture or scripture itself (a phenomenon that was not uncommon with scribes)."

Whether or not the Trinity is a bible teaching is another question - but the data is overwhelming that, from a purely biblical perspective, the Comma Johanneum is not admissable as evidence.

As we’ve previously agreed, one way or another, God sees to it that the biblical text remains uncorrupted and clearly intelligible to his creation.

Hey anthony, I myself got a weird email as well, I will be forwarding it to you, I think someone is trying to impersonate me as I am a poster on here, so you would be more apt to read it (why anyone would read an email from me, is beyond me, but hey, I suppose someone would)  Just hopped on the site to check if something weird has been posted about it, and haven’t seen anything.

I received an email today from a person who typed "vergecs@yahoo.com" as his/her return address.  But when I replied, it bounced, saying that there was no such account on Yahoo.  So, since I have no other way of contacting this person, I figured I’d post a reply here.

Original message:

I’m thinking of buying the exact same power inverter via Ebay for pretty much the same purpose and I want to ask ya if it was working out good for ya still?

Thanks

My reply, that didn’t go through:

Hi there,

Yeah, my inverter is working great, still.  I’ve been using it for 3 months now, and haven’t had any problems.  In fact, just last weekend I was using both outlets on it, one for my carPC and the other to charge my digital camera.  Not that charging the camera necessarily draws a lot of current, but it was nice that it worked without any problems.

Hope this helps,
Anthony