LATEST UPDATE (17:12): The blog has been running on the new machine most of the afternoon.

There's an intermittent problem with the backend network, which causes the database to become unavailable for brief periods at unpredictable times. As a result, comments, the event calendar and the voter database will be intermittently unavailable. I'm in touch with tech support on this.

Some other "new server" glitches have been fixed --

* the clock had been set way off when the new server was rebooted earlier. So some of the recent comments have the wrong timestamp. New comments should have the right time/date.

* I turned comments back on after tightening the filter to eliminate the flood of comment spam that brought the machine to its knees earlier.