Otherwise known as a bug.

Turns out that Covenant Eyes, which as I’ve said before is quite a good system, can screw you around a bit.

What it does is log everything you access online to an account on the CE servers. Problem is, if it can’t access the CE mothership to log in, then your internet access is locked down.

Today, it seems that the Covenant Eyes server went down for a while, confirmed by checking on another CE-free computer. Everything on my end was fine – I could even ping google.com – but because Covenant Eyes couldn’t phone home it locked everything up, then proceeded to crash.

Problem was, I had a whole mass of work from UNSW to do at the time. And much of it required internet access.

No, really. Properly required, not ‘I just need to look up smh.com’. Papers, online apps, email correspondence, that sort of thing.

And I couldn’t do anything. I just got a hung system, and then (much) later a zillion pop-ups, all of which need to be clicked on individually, telling me something I already know by looking at the little closed eye icon in the menu bar.

(Open eye, working internet. Shut eye, tubes are closed.)

Surely this is not great behaviour on the part of Covenant Eyes. If the system can’t access home base, can’t it just write to a local file and then sync later on?

In fact, why isn’t this the default behaviour?

Institutes of the Christian Religion, IV.xvii.2:

Godly souls can gather great assurance and delight from [the Lord's Supper]; in it they have a witness of our growth into one body with Christ such that whatever is his may be called ours. As a consequence, we may dare assure ourselves that eternal life, of which he is the heir, is ours; and that the Kingdom of Heaven, into which he has already entered, can no more be cut off from us than from him; again, that we cannot be condemned for our sins, from whose guilt he has absolved us, since he willed to take them upon himself as if they were his own. This is the wonderful exchange which, out of his measureless benevolence, he has made with us; that, becoming Son of man with us, he has made us sons of God with him; that, by his descent to earth, he has prepared an ascent to heaven for us; that, by taking on our mortality, he has conferred his immortality upon us; that, accepting our weakness, he has strengthened us by his power; that, receiving our poverty unto himself, he has transferred his wealth to us; that, taking the weight of our iniquity upon himself (which oppressed us), he has clothed us with his righteousness.