| Stupak idiocy.... |
[Nov. 15th, 2009|01:18 am] |
Irritated. Send a coat hanger to pro-choice Dems who voted for #Stupak Amendment: http://www.sendacoathanger.com @credomobile Please RT
(Tweeted today)
Considering delivering a coat hanger to my rep's office Monday. And the link to the web site of couples talking about needing emergency second and third term abortions (http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/index.html). There's one or two places left to get them -- and when you need one, you are desperate, as your hoped-for pregnancy goes south in a hideous way.
Do not let a bunch of old white men tell you what is in your heart. God knows what is in your heart, and what choices are before you. It's your business, you and your SO and God's -- and the doctor who allows you information and choice. The lobbyists of the Catholic Church caused Stupak to be grafted into the health bill at the last minute.
At the very least, I think it's time the Catholic church lost its tax exemption...along with several other churches/denominations. |
|
|
| LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares! |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|01:53 pm] |
Notes augmented
We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!
Product tweaks and bug kill
- In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
- If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
- The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
- If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
- If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
- Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)
New FCK fixes rich text editor!
- We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
- When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
- RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
- An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
- The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers
LiveJournal Cares
We’re pleased to introduce you to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.
In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.
Papered in postcards
A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.
Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!
Photos of the week
We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.
You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!
( Read more... )
Curtains
We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week! |
|
|
| Thank you. |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|09:52 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  respectful | ] |
It's good to remember.
And it's good to take a moment to thank those who did what they had to do.
Even if they're no longer with us.
So, again... thank you. |
|
|
| Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|02:00 pm] |
EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.
Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!
Thanks ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!
---
On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.
Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.
We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!
As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work. |
|
|
| Not bad for the underpaid majority.... |
[Nov. 11th, 2009|01:52 pm] |
Women-owned firms have huge impact on economy.
http://view.ed4.net/v/DE7W/25RRU/18GBO17/KQ3ZG4/
And from the Harvard Business Review:
"As a market, women represent an opportunity bigger than China and India combined. They control $20 trillion in consumer spending, and that figure could reach $28 trillion in the next five years. Women drive the world economy, in fact. Yet most companies do a remarkably poor job of serving them." |
|
|
| I'm an Action Hero |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|10:05 pm] |
I've been slacking on regular posting, which I will try to fill in with backdates. Still I'd like to get one post done before my trip to Austin, since I suck at updates while I'm on a trip.
Have I mentioned I'm headed back to Austin for a week?
Anyhow ... the most notable thing that happened to me recently is that the acupuncturist accidentally left a needle in my leg. I'm not sure how far in those suckers are supposed to go ... either much farther than I thought, or I smacked it while I was getting up.
Now, don't be alarmed: I didn't feel a thing. Not even a pinch. But as I was getting dressed I looked down and saw the hilt of one of those things sticking out of me. So, I thought, I can call the acupuncturist while I'm mostly naked and don't even have a sheet on me so he can remove it professionally, or I can just Pull. It. Out. Myself.
I did, and about two inches more steel came out of my body than the inch I was somehow expecting. It was nutsy.
I could feel the sensation of pulling something out of my body, but no pain.
And that, my friends, is quite likely was the single most macho moment of my life. |
|
|
| Wooo! Loud! |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|11:51 pm] |
Just got back from the show... awesome! We got there early, and were right up front for the opening act, Captain Clegg and the Night Creatures were outstanding... really great stuff! The Nekromantix were... loud. And fast. But they overplayed their gear, so it was more wall-of-sound than anything coherent. Which is a shame, 'cause they were fun, but... should have gone to 10, not 12.
And Rob Zombie was just awesome, as always. Incredibly tight band, and effects. Having seen him in small halls like this, and in stadiums... it's always a great show. Cracked me up how many people were texting during it. Zombie even griped a bit, suggesting people put down their iPhones and rock... they can tweet about how great the show was, afterwards. Fortunately many people heeded this advice, and the crowd became a lot more fun and energetic. Go figure.
Got clung to early in the show by a VERY drunk dancer, who fortunately was also nice, and all three of us had a moderately coherent conversation. She eventually hooked back up with her date... and was last seen being escorted out under medical care. Which is good, 'cause she was really, really woozy. Alchohol makes you smarter. ;p
Tired now. Sleep soon. But ... yay, fun concert! :> |
|
|
| BookViewCafe.com Welcomes Deborah J. Ross |
[Nov. 10th, 2009|06:11 pm] |
Hey! New BVC author!
*********
On Tuesday, November 10, fantasy and science fiction author, Deborah J. Ross, joins the BookviewCafe.com team. Deborah grew up in California and Oregon, growing her hair long, protesting everything and gathering useless academic degrees. As Deborah Wheeler, she wrote two science fiction novels, JAYDIUM and NORTHLIGHT, as well as short stories in ASIMOV'S, F & SF, SISTERS OF THE NIGHT, STAR WARS: TALES FROM JABBA'S PALACE, REALMS OF FANTASY, and almost all of the SWORD & SORCERESS and Darkover anthologies. Her most recent projects -- under her birth name, Ross -- include Darkover novels with the late Marion Zimmer Bradley (the fifth of which, HASTUR LORD, is due out 2/2010), and an original epic-fantasy series, THE SEVEN-PETALED SHIELD. She made her editorial debut in 2008 with LACE AND BLADE. In between writing, she's lived in France, worked as a medical assistant to a cardiologist, revived an elementary school library, studied kung fu, Hebrew and yoga, and is active in the local Quaker community. She makes her home in a redwood forest.
Ross will be launching at Book View Café with “Heart Healer,” first published in 2002 in the anthology, DAW 30th Anniversary Fantasy. In addition, every Tuesday in December, Ross will post excerpts from the new Darkover novel, HASTUR LORD, and blog about writing with Marion Zimmer Bradley at the BVC blog, http://blog.bookviewcafe.com.
Visit Ross’s bookshelf at BookViewCafe.com: http://www.bookviewcafe.com/index.php/Deborah-J.-Ross/
Watch for future offerings from Ross on Tuesdays at http://www.bookviewcafe.com. |
|
|
| Zombeh! |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|08:08 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | music | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  excited | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Rob Zombie | ] |
You know what's awesome? THIS!
What's even more awesome? We've got tickets, hangin' on the fridge.
Awesome. |
|
|
| This weekend I: |
[Nov. 9th, 2009|11:58 am] |
Started a fire with flint and steel (+2 to Survival Skill) (+1 for figuring out tinder, +1 for figuring out what part of the flint (sharp, almost fragile edges) make the best sparks)
Batted away a flying can of silly string headed for my head, left handed, before I realized what it was. (+2 to AC with one free hand due to +2 to reflex)
Procured new dining room furniture. Broke a nail trying to work one of the tables (complete with bending back of nail and subdural hemorrhaging) (-2 to Craft(Woodworking) skill).
Substituted more sturdy and larger bedroom furniture for the same price as sideboard and cabinet that still matched the tables and bench. (+2 to Profession(Home Decorator))
Determined I need to game more. Or at least some, because some would be more than what I'm doing now. |
|
|
| Done! |
[Nov. 8th, 2009|08:31 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | heart | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  happy | ] |
Oh, yeah; this happened while I was deep in the midst of SCARE work so I totally forgot to mention it:
I had one last check-in with my electrophysiologist a couple of weeks ago. We reviewed everything one more time and he took me off the baby aspirin, the last med I was on for my heart. He looked over the various reports and diagnostics and informed me that my heart's in great shape, very healthy, and the last CT scan I had shows no plaque build-up in any arteries, so he's cutting me loose. I'll do another visit in a year or so just to touch base, but it looks like that chapter of my life is over now.
And I'm pretty darn happy about the whole thing. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
angry
working
pleased
irritated
excited