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

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. 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
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. 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)!
5. 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
6. 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!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to 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!

Anon meme!
(Otherwise known as attention whore meme)

If there is something you'd like to say to me, anonymously or otherwise, my thread can be found here.

NOTE:
If you do comment make sure you reply to my thread instead of posting a new comment otherwise it will get lost in the comment spam of the uber-post

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.

From NARAL:

Hi -

I'm pretty angry that the House passed an anti-choice measure that would essentially eliminate insurance coverage for abortion in the new system. Health reform is important, but no one should lose coverage in the new system.

I just signed a petition to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid asking him to stand strong against a similar attack in the Senate. Will you add your name? The deadline is 12 noon (EST) on Friday, November 13.

http://action.prochoiceamerica.org/site/Advocacy?id=4013&pagename=homepage

Thanks for standing up for women!
To take action on this issue, click on the link below:
https://secure.prochoiceamerica.org/site/Advocacy?s_oo=69gKKTAtN0Ip7I8GYO_WVQ..&id=4013
If the text above does not appear as a link or it wraps across multiple lines, then copy and paste it into the address area of your browser.

From NARAL and the House:

Attention Michigan residents: Rep. Stupak, he of the anti-choice Stupak-Pitts amendment "fame," is holding a townhall today.

Here are the details:

Wednesday, November 11, 2009
5:30 PM - 7:00 PM (EST)
Bay de Noc Community College
Besse Center
2001 North Lincoln Rd
Escanaba, MI
(Map It)
From Rep. Stupak's press release:

U.S. Congressman Bart Stupak (D-Menominee) will host a town hall meeting in Escanaba on Wednesday, November 11, from 5:30 - 7:00 p.m. (EST) at Bay de Noc Community College's Besse Center. The meeting is open to the public and will provide an opportunity for constituents to ask Stupak questions on a range of issues, including health care and the economy. Stupak will also provide an update on his work in Congress.

The Besse Center is located at 2001 North Lincoln Rd, Escanaba, Mich.

"This is an opportunity to speak with constituents, answer their questions, and address their concerns about the critical issues currently impacting Northern Michigan, including the health care bill passed by the U.S. House of Representatives this past weekend," Stupak said. "I look forward to engaging in a respectful, civil dialogue on a broad range of issues. I enjoy hearing from constituents and the ideas and feedback I receive at town hall meetings, and through the letters, emails, faxes and telephone calls to my offices is valuable to me personally and is critical to the work I do in Congress."

Out of respect for all those wishing to attend the town hall meeting only credentialed media will be permitted to record the event. Signs, banners and posters will not be allowed inside the center.
If you live near Escanaba, Michigan... this would be a good opportunity for you to tell Rep. Stupak what you think about his anti-choice amendment.

And might I also suggest you sign our petition calling on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to stand firm against a ban on abortion coverage for women in the new health system? Thanks!

I am excited and it is an unusual kind of excitement. Normally one gets excited by anticipating things to come. In this case I am excited by something now past. I have finally finished my fantasy setting The Lands.

Well possibly “comprehensive” is a better word than “complete”. I could always focus in on particular aspects of my world and expand on them (indeed this may happen if I run adventures in it). However what I have written provides both a framework and a sufficiently complex texturing to satisfy me that I can now share it with others.

I am somewhat sensitive to giving the impression that I am one of those who spend way too much time putting elaborate things onto the Internet. In my defence I want to stress that this concept has been under development for a very long time and much of what is on the site began as word-processed documents. The site itself has existed since 2006 even if the content has expanded and changed since then. Nonetheless it is true that I have put a lot of hours into it lately. Living in the Bush Capital between jobs has given me the chance to finally finish something that seemed like it would never be done.

The Lands began in the late 80s as the setting for a short story – The Death Of Erilore – which I never completed. This childish story and likewise its setting was totally derivative of Lord Of The Rings. It even involved a quest to get rid of a treasure. The greatest attraction for me of Middle Earth was its complexity – the notion of a fictional story having a faux non-fictional swath of supporting notes was a tantalizing one for me. Naturally I drew a map for my story which has been redrawn a number of times till it became the one presented here and here. And – yes – like Middle Earth it has an ocean in the west and a north-south running mountain range dividing it in half.

By the 90s The Lands had been converted into the setting for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) role-play games (RPGs). The Lands changed accordingly from a misty-grey habitation of legends into the more lurid ‘Technicolor’ setting one expects of modern pulp fantasy. The diversity of inhabitants grew markedly to better fit the expectations of D&D players. Mind you it has always annoyed me just how very crowded D&D worlds seem to be. The word ‘Kobold’ is just German for 'Goblin' (and vice versa) and yet in D&D they have described two rather different monsters to fit those two words. I have reversed the process somewhat and made them just one race with more than one name. Likewise I have given geographic and historic context to all my races so that any one place-and-time is only as crowded as it should be.

My background as a humanities student has impacted on The Lands significantly. There is a lot more exposition on the politics and culture of its inhabitants than would be expected of a fantasy RPG settings. It is this aspect of writing that I have enjoyed the most and which characterizes most chapters.

Much of my text describes The Lands themselves and is original – or rather it is derivative of many things rather than just one thing as it initially was. However towards the end of the site I have adapted D&D game rules. Most are small to moderate changes to the older editions I am familiar with. However in the case of Magic the changes are larger. The long lists of very specific spells has been replaced by fewer but more versatile spells – in a sense I have shifted from a digital to an analogue take on spell-casting more like that in the Ars Magica RPG.

All sorts of things have had an impact on the content of The Lands and include history from the ancient Mediterranean to medieval Europe, politics of the modern era, legends and fables, modern fantasy and science fiction. Even some very basic biology creeps in and is why I feel obliged to provide explanations for why some vertebrates have more than four limbs (something nobody need do in a fantasy setting). Overall I have attempted to produce a fictional setting that is different but still recognizably one we could imagine living in.

All-in-all I have had a lot of fun devising and revising this stuff but am also relieved that it is done. Any comments and observations are welcome and I hope a few others enjoy reading about The Lands as I have enjoyed writing about them.

Cross-posted here.

Well that is the way to celebrate a birthday.

Margaret got in late on Friday and after we met up we went back to the hotel and had a glass of Champagne. Very nice.

After a pleasant morning drinking coffee and reading it was off to the River Cafe for a totally wonderful lunch.

To start I had pasta with a sauce made from rabbit, pheasant and grouse. Very very delicious. Margaret had Langoustine which where also excellent. However the stand out dish was the beef secondi. It was two peices of beef fillet that had been wrapped in procuito and then cooked very very slowly in wine. It was so so tender so so tasty. Margaret didn't finish hers so we took Gordon Ramsey's advice and asked for it to be wrapped up so we could take it away. It made a very tasty breakfast on Sunday morning. We also had a rather excellent wine which broke all my usual wine rules. It was called "L'insiemme" and was a 2005 Nebbiolo/Barbera/Cab. Sav/Pinot Noir) from Ca Viola of Piemonte, Italy. It broke the no more than two grape variety rule that I have but we had it on advice of the Somelier and it lived up to her promises. I have drunk wines that opened up or changed as you drank them but I have never had one that changed quite so often. Sometimes it was the fruit of the cab sav, sometimes the light earlyness of the Pinot at other times something else entirely. The Somelier it was quirky and very much a bit of fun.

After a lesuirely walk and a bit of shopping we moved on to the Devonshire Arms for drinks with friends. We had quite a good turn out and I can say this is a very nice pub. They had Hobgoblin and DoomBar on tap and by all acounts some good mulled cider and a few good wines. We had a good turn out with 8 people other than myself and Margaret oh and a dog. (Hi Freki) From there a few of us returned to our hotel for more drinks. I had an excellent single malt.

A slight draw back to the weekend was the hotel. The Park City in Kensington is nice enough hotel and so it should be but something was wrong with their heating and it was stuck on meaning that it was bakingly hot in the room at night. Not terribly pleasant. When we asked about getting it fixed we where promised maintanence on Saturday morning but on Saturday morning we where told there was no maintance on the weekends. Pretty poor realy.

Sunday morning after a long lie in (interupted by a call my from Brother and his daughter at 8:30am) we went in search of breakfast. We found a rather splendidly chaotic place where I had a most excellent bacon sarnie and Margaret had pancakes.

So yes a rather good way to spend your birthday.

No peer pressure or anything seeing as how some people went straight home and uploaded to fb because they are actually enormous nerds :) .....

... but photos from Gab & Michael's wedding:

Preceremony
Wedding Ceremony
Post ceremony
Reception

Edited to add: Congress is in fact OPEN today (Saturday) and people CAN call their Reps NOW! I just called Speaker Pelosi's office in DC and they had people answering the phones. People on the west coast should have a bit more time to phone their local offices, as well, SO PICK UP THE PHONE AND MAKE IT HAPPEN, FOLKS!!! This is SERIOUS!

The Capitol Switchboard is RINGING BUSY, so go here to find the contact info for your reps: http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/mcapdir.html

Don't know who your rep is??? Go here to locate them by zip code (top left corner): http://www.house.gov/

Hello Friends,

Please forward widely!

This morning around 1am, Members of the US Congress House of
Representatives agreed to allow an Up or Down Vote TODAY to create
what would essentially become a "de facto ban" on abortion services
for private as well as potential public insurers. This is outrageous
and NEEDS TO BE STOPPED!

Where do your reps stand?
Check here: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/7/801738/-HCR-House-Debate:-The-Stupak-Amendment

Make sure to contact your Representative in the House and Senate via
email and follow up on Monday morning with a phone call!!!
Go here: http://www.prochoiceamerica.org/issues/abortion/access-to-abortion/health-care-reform.html

News from The NY Times:
http://prescriptions.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/abortion-fight-erupts-in-health-care-debate/
From The Hill (DC):
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/66789-stupak-to-get-up-or-down-vote-on-amendment-to-block-abortion-funding

In Pro-Choice Solidarity!

Pls. x-post!

Hi Friends,

On November 5, the US Senate held the first hearings on a fully
transgender inclusive ENDA Bill –
http://help.senate.gov/Hearings/2009_11_05/2009_11_05.html

Please call your Senators and encourage them to vote YES on the
Transgender Inclusive ENDA Bill – S. 1584, in the United States
Senate.

Where do your Senators stand?
See here: http://www.actonprinciples.org/enda-senate/

To find out who your Senators are, as well as ascertain their contact
information please see this link:
http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/general/one_item_and_teasers/contacting.htm

Thanks!

The empire strikes back

In recent weeks, we've taken huge steps towards blocking spam accounts on LiveJournal. In fact, we've suspended as many as 30,000 accounts in a single day! We've implemented several pre-emptive measures to prevent the creation of spam accounts, and we've honed our detection of suspicious content. Spam bots are a crafty lot, so we'll continue to refine our tactics and keep up the good fight to keep you safe from spam attacks on LiveJournal.

RSS feeds again

If you're addicted to xkcd_rss, icanhaschzbrgr, or other syndicated feeds, we're pleased to report that we've resolved the update error that was mucking up your RSS feeds. While content was being pulled correctly, it wasn't being posted to the feeds themselves. Late last week, we finally nailed down what we hope was the root problem, so content should post properly. We thank you for your patience.

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

If you're a gamer who loves CSI, have Wii got news for you! c_s_i is sponsoring killer contests. Simply post a question to a member of the CSI crew. The winner will get a free copy of CSI: Deadly Intent for Nintendo Wii (with a retail value of $39.99) and get their question answered by a member of the CSI writing team! There's also a fantastic monthly contest. To enter, join c_s_i, play the online version of CSI: Deadly Intent, and respond to a two-part query for a chance to win a Wii! Entries will be judged on composition and originality. Sorry, but you must be a U.S. resident and over 18 years old to participate. Check out the rules here.

Enveloped in postcards

Last week, we asked you to send in postcards to help us decorate our drab concrete walls. Here's a photo of the results so far! Thank you so much and please keep them coming! You can mail them 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 giving ten random users paid account credits.

Photos of the week

If you haven't visited our new LiveJournal photo community, you're in for an amazing visual trip. LiveJournal users from around the world will take you on a scenic journey to everywhere. Post your own pictures or kick back and enjoy at lj_photophile. You can view some of this week's awesome photos after the jump. Please start tagging with geographic location, since we'd like to track all the places around the world represented in this community. Keep on commenting too!
( Read more... )

Recently, they've been filming a new version of "Clash of the Titans".
Gone is the virtuosic stop-motion animation of Ray Harryhausen, replaced by CGI (he's unhappy there's no stop-mo in the remake of "his" film) that appears to be in the style of "300". I'm puzzled by Hollywood's fascination with remaking classic films / TV shows, usually making a hash of it in the process.
Looking on the bright side, they're rumoured to have kept the story mostly the same.
And the cast ain't half bad. The film stars Liam Neesona Zeus, Ralph Fiennes as Hades, Gemma Arterton as Io, and Sam Worthington as the heroic Perseus.
Directed by Louis Leterrier, who did the latest "Incredible Hulk" film and "Transporter 2".

( Movie promo posters and a still from the film )

Well I finally did it. I rebuilt my laptop.

Its all gone very well so far.

Just need to reinstall most of the applications but I am waiting for the Windows Update to finish up first.

I don't often re-post stuff from GetUp here because I assume most of my friends are intelligent/educated enough to be aware of the issues (or are already subscribed to GetUp)...but this recent mess over boat-people makes it necessary to try that bit harder to get the message out far and wide.

As I see it, K-Rudd is doing a J.Ho -- having a go at refugees for political gain.
It's disgusting to take such a cheap shot when people's lives are at stake and in light of our international human rights obligations.

It might be a bit much for a show of compassion from the (not-so-)Liberal Party, and I'm sick of the way the ALP are borrowing their worst policies...but let's at least attempt to have some truth in the debate over asylum-seekers and boat-people.

GetUp's page on the issue: http://www.getup.org.au/campaign/EndMandatoryDetention&id=818

The GetUp fact-sheet is quite informative and well researched. Debunk the myths: https://www.getup.org.au/files/campaigns/asylum_myths_factsheet.pdf

Nic & Lee's (mostly photos of foods): http://gallery.arsimagica.net/gallery/733

Halloween & assorted birthdayness: http://gallery.arsimagica.net/gallery/734

EDIT: If you're reading this, our maintenance is OVER! The problem was not found on our equipment, which means we'll have to work with our ISP to fix this small problem -- which also means another maintenance window in the future -- but at least we have eliminated our side.

Thank you everyone, and a special shout out to rekoil for giving me a great suggestion AND also the opportunity to feel like I've just called in to a local radio station.

Have a great day, night or afternoon wherever you may be.

---

Hi everyone, sorry for the late notice but I'm going to have to do some testing on 1 of our 4 internet circuits TONIGHT; Friday night or Saturday morning depending on which time zone you're in.

Most of us shouldn't notice any impact, though there may be some slowness or lag when I switch traffic on to our other ISP circuits and then another hit when I stop the tests. If a page won't load or times out, try hitting refresh 1 or 2 times and it should load then. If it doesn't work at all... trust me, I'll be typing really really really fast to try to undo whatever I just did. Hopefully you'll have some Halloween candy (if you're in the USA and celebrate that kind of thing) nearby to take away the bitterness of a small site outage. :(

Here's the handy-dandy Website That I Always Use to get a feel for when the maintenance will start in your area. Our site traffic historically dips on Friday afternoons until Saturday morning which is why we tend to pick this time for maintenance work.

( tech details )

status.livejournal.org will, of course be updated before and after the maintenance window. Or else marta will get mad at me. :D

bt

I'll never know why we have to work Easter Tuesday these days, but then we get a Tuesday off in November to watch a 3 mintue horse race. Honestly. It's a freaking HORSE RACE.

That being said, i welcome and/or support this random holiday with gusto and enthusiasm. Not working on Wednesdays and taking the Monday off as leave gives me a five day holiday.

So in honour of the horse race that hopefully will allow me to go to bunnings to buy much wood and then ruin it with the router in the back lean to, here is a picture i call 'at the races'.