User talk:Conrad Leviston

<evil grin> Actually I did know the dragon was the natural enemy of the elephant. For the dragon is a serpent and the serpent did offer the fruit of the tree to eve. ;-) Bet you didn't know 12th C dragons only had 2 legs though. :-)

Tiffany (just a little light bedtime reading :-) )

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The serpent offering the fruit, huh? I suppose all those tales of dragons capturing fair maidens makes sense in that context. Especially if you're one of those nutty religious types who believes that the fruit is a metaphor for sex. The maid is captured by the rapacious and then rescued by the chaste.

I'm still not sure how the elephant comes into it though.

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I think it's a red herring - actually a real observation of african snakes that could strangle large animals - a piece of factual information that slipped in by accident amoungst all that metaphor. I bet the early greek descriptions show dragons as just a large snake with no legs.

Tiff

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Good work on the Line divisions articles. - Tobin 21:30, 10 Jun 2004 (EST)

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Yep, I did all that while I was at work (a quiet night on the door can be very productive). It was actually really easy to draw up the images. Conrad Leviston 22:24, 10 Jun 2004 (EST)

Special Chars

I think the missing special chars are my fault (in fact I'm certain they are my fault). They are still in the database but the software is having some trouble understanding them.

I'll try to fix this on the weekend. - Tobin 01:34, 17 Jun 2004 (EST)

Seems to be back in order now. Some pages changed since the problem started might still be messed up. - Tobin 12:36, 17 Jun 2004 (EST)

Categories

Hi Conrad, I notice that there is a heraldry category AND a devices category. Shouldn't a lot of the pages you are editing go in the devices category or should that one be removed? - Cian Gillebhrath 11:01, 15 Jul 2004 (EST)

I'm guessing devices should be removed Conrad Leviston 11:11, 15 Jul 2004 (EST)

On second thoughts maybe devices should be used for things like Arms of the Kingdom of Lochac. Conrad Leviston 11:15, 15 Jul 2004 (EST)

I think the pages relating to parts of devices should be in Category:Device heraldry which should be a sub category of Category:Heraldry. - Tobin 09:34, 18 Jul 2004 (EST)

Sounds good. Is there a quick way of doing this? Conrad Leviston 21:22, 18 Jul 2004 (EST)

Not really. Since I'm using a tabbed browser it's not uncomfortable for me to do it though. Leave it to me I'll get onto it. - Tobin 10:08, 19 Jul 2004 (EST)

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Thank you for fixingf my image link on the pennanular page. I could not, for the life of me, get it to work right, and I tried 2 or 3 times.

Lady Marguerie de Jauncourt

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Morning Conrad. What are you using as your main source for all this stuff on Troubadours? I'm collecting data on Sir Ulrich for the tourney, and I was wondering if you had something I should be aware of. - Cian Gillebhrath 11:15, 29 Jul 2004 (EST)

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Hi, I am a librarian at Central Michigan University and I added links to several of your pages dealing with national histories (see France and Germany). I was amused by the comical history attempts on the prior pages and thought I would add a link to better the histories. I was quite mystified to see these labelled as possible link spam.  :]

I was going to blog Cunnan at my information literacy blog (lorenzen.blogspot.com) pointing out how outsiders can improve flawed history sites but if you think I am spam...

I appreciate your link vigillance. Could you let me know how you determine real link adds from spam? (Note what you reply may be used on my blog.)

Thanks,

Best wishes,

Michael Lorenzen

Midi uploads

You should now be able to upload midi files (with either .mid or .midi as their extensions). Let me know if it doesn't work.

By the way, Lilypond (the music typsetter I've been raving about) outputs midi along with sheet music by default. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilypond and http://lilypond.org/

If you have hardcopy sheet music I'm happy to typeset it so we can upload PDF and midi files.

Tobin 00:15, 31 Aug 2004 (EST)

Redirects

My experience is that like html code, a #redirect does not need to be capitalised to work. Have you heard otherwise? BTW sometimes I redirect to pages that are linked to but haven't been written yet. Jesus to Jesus Christ was one of those. - Cian Gillebhrath

I thought lack of capitalisation was the reason the redirect wasn't working. Having changed it I realised my mistake. Conrad Leviston 08:06, 5 Nov 2004 (EST)

Spam alert

Current events has been "hit" again -- Cursitor 20:12(GMT) 23/5

• I have undone the spam and blocked the URL for a couple of days. - Cian Gillebhrath

Thank you. --Simoncursitor 12:30, 24 May 2005 (CDT)

England

The "history" to my talk page indicates you queried the subdivisions of the England page (and indeed I now see that page also ratifies this). Certainly what you have done conforms to the usual sub-divisions (chronologically as opposed to geographically) of English history. Ango-Saxon will always be a problem, since it covers the fluctuating fortunes of Celt, Angle & Saxon per se, Danish raider, and Englishmen. But as a term is better than anything I could think of. I'm not sure how you're going to distinguicsh between Lancastrian and Yorkists. Obviously half of them came from the wrong side of the Pennines, but that's local prejudice!! Otherwise I don't know what particular distinction you are going to draw, whereas with the Tudors, you're looking at half-Welsh kings, with a claim rooted in bloody conquest, who book-end Period. [I agree Elizabeth needs a block on her own, for political and religious reasons, and because she was, in effect, an era of her own]. I look forward to seeing you develop this and will add the page to my watch-list, in case there is anything direct i can do to help. --Simoncursitor 04:34, 22 Jun 2005 (CDT)

Re: Laurel Wreath

You're welcome! If you need other graphics, just let me know. Generating heraldic graphics (for submission or diplay) has become my specialty. And mundanely, I have a little time on my hands right now. You're better off to contact me via e-mail with a request since I don't always get to Cunnan regularly. --Sabine 12:45, 13 Jul 2005 (CDT)Sabine

I can do that. Though I suspect it is acceptable to link to/use the ones on the Kingdom web site. I'll be away from my computer for a few days, but I'll take a look next week. Sabine

Re Scottish Kings template

This looks lovely (tho I have little/no idea how to use it). Thnak you for all the wikifying you've been doing to the pages, as well.
My one concern is that, on some kings, the template will be bigger than the article, because So Little is known (I have resolutely steered clear of Certain American web-sources, who claim All Sorts of Things for the Scottish monarchy). --Simoncursitor 01:50, 20 Jul 2005 (CDT)

Re Barony Box

Glad you like it. I can't currently think of a way around the image issue without making the process more complex, which isn't what the wiki needs. I created a Shire box just now and modified the 'rulers' to just have the seneschal.

re: Welcome

Hi Conrad, I'm glad to help. I'm not in the SCA actually, I'm an anthropology student and a western martial artist. I study western martial arts from the High Middle German "fechbucher" of the Liechtenauer tradition as well as sidesword of the Bardi tradition, and Capo Ferro's Rapier. I've also studied the medieval period in general and European armor in specific.

I like your wiki, it's a good online resource. I could add/edit sections on medieval sword combat and/or 14-16th C. fight treatises. Would all of you be interested? It's not necessarily related to the SCA and SCA combat doesn't use it specifically. Most of the rapier material would be appropriate to SCA rapier. But I don't know how to make it SCA specific.

Don't worry about making it SCA specific. You'll soon notice many pages have sections "X in medieval times" and "X in the SCA". The former is often much harder to find people to write about, so we'd really love you to write about the topics that you know about. Anything medieval is interesting to us, and there are actually people in the SCA studying from these texts (just not in mainstream combat), so it is very relevant to the SCA too. The decision to make an SCA slant, was more an admission that we probably couldn't sucessfully provide information about every tradition of every reenactment group. We hope to have lots of historical information, and some really nifty explainations of how that can be applied to reenactment, as well as explainations of some SCA traditions and structures. We hope to be usefull to more than just SCA members too. Tiff

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I was hoping you were going to step in on the coblas etc pages. Glad you did. I couldn't tell whether there was any truth in the meaningless waffling. - Cian Gillebhrath

Re: Jockstrap

A "box", huh? A "box" means something very different in North American slang. Sure, it still deals with the groinal area, but just on a lady. "Cup" is better, if only because it lends itself to practical jokes involving beer. User:Paul Matisz

Thanks for the heads-up on the sysop thing. As for cups, etc, I maintain an interest in slang from various parts of the world. Did you know that in Britain the term "to knock her up" means simply to knock on the door to rouse someone? Strange people. User:Paul Matisz

• As I indicated on the cup page, this sense of "box" comes from cricket. To quote the OED:

A light shield worn by cricketers to protect the genitals. 
1950 N. CARDUS Second Innings iv. 90 Not every player in those days used a �box�. 
1964 I. FLEMING You only live Twice xi. 139 �What is a box?� 
�It is what our cricketers wear to protect those parts when they go out to bat.
It is a light padded shield of aluminium.�

Of course, these days it isn't aluminium. - Cian Gillebhrath

Spam and features to stop it

My jaw about hit the ground when I saw what version of the wiki you are running here, it's sorely outdated even for the 1.4 series. Might I suggest a significant upgrade (1.6.7 comes to mind) and installation of two extensions that will curb so much of your spamming traffic. The first extension is Spam Blacklist which allows you to list domains/urls that, when found in a article, prevent someone from saving the page. The second is called "Bad Bahavior" and it does many cool things, but one of the most important is to block a ton of proxy connection that are commonly used for spamming. I believe it also address spambots that can race through a wiki in no time. These are just so friendly suggestions from someone who doesn't visit Cunnan too often, but likes to see his images up on the front page, lol. Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine 22:27, 20 Jun 2006 (EST)

Tag

You're it (re: alternates in Talk:knight) :^) - Cian Gillebhrath 15:15, 30 August 2006 (EST)

Ostgardr

Thanks for the kind words. I am still working on banging it into shape as time permits -- mostly research time as some of those events and names are buried in the past:-) Thanks for the pointers, I'll get to the things you mentioned as soon as I can ... AlexandreDavigne 23:53, 2 November 2006 (EST)

Guelphs

Thank you for this, which goes some way to explaining what the G/G wars were about -- Simoncursitor 19:40, 17 November 2006 (EST)