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November 14th, 2009
reddragdiva
 | 09:41 pm - Ricochet days.
People are apparently out tonight painting the town red with wild abandon. ![[info - personal]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) arkady and Freda and I are in painting the house tired. We have done not a whole lot today except a huge food delivery and herding the toddler, who has been a major trouble source. Said toddler has collapsed asleep on mum and so we're sitting around basking in doing bugger-all and running out of Internet.
I got paid yesterday and have spent yesterday and today and will be spending tomorrow buying and paying off things. When we're out of money, I get to wait another month. Yay!
The job continues to be interesting. My boss was off stripping wallpaper the last two days, so I got a gentle introduction to the deep end. The office tech wiki contains just a bit more important information now.
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reddragdiva
| 12:28 am - 69 love songs.
Drinks and dinner with Kul Wadwha from Wikimedia and Mark, a doctor who knows everyone. We spent the evening drinking and eating and talking erudite rubbish. We feel we can take over the world. The basic procedure being to put up curated content on a controlled site and release it as CC by-sa. Or CC by. Or public domain. Give away everything, just control your copy. And credit — credit is everything. That took up about half an hour, the rest was us talking rubbish. Oh, the NPG thing is apparently working out okay. Lots of work to do, but the meeting was very positive for all parties. I'm sure more detail will be released as appropriate.
I got paid today. I can't tell you how unstressed I am all of a sudden. Tomorrow (today) is shopping day. I get non-dead shoes.
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November 13th, 2009
silentq
 | 10:59 am - Quick PSA
Raks Spooki is on Sunday, the Regent box office is open during the day tomorrow to pick up tickets. I'm really looking forward to seeing all the performances, especially those by my friends (first time seeing ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) syprina dance!). :)
Bikes Not Bombs is doing a bike donation drive tomorrow in Arlington and Winchester.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/classic/angry.gif) stressed
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November 12th, 2009
rufus
 | 10:44 pm - Photographs, a love story: pt. 2
Mid-November is kind of early to be doing a year in pictures, but, further to yesterday's post, here's an assortment of pictures from this year that I liked.
You saw my annual trip to Coney Island yesterday; after that I guess it was too cold for photography, because I didn't put much of anything else up until April, when I went on a cruise around Manhattan. All things considered I took a tiny amount of pictures. This is one of the better ones:
The others include a lot of almost-anonymous pictures of the Manhattan shoreline, and curiously sterile pictures of open water. I mean, I know I was taking a picture of the infamous Hell's Gate, but there's no whirlpool there anymore. It's just a big expanse of river.
( more compare and contrast )
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glasgow_fen
[rhionnach]
 | 11:54 pm - New venue for Trout
At tonight's Trout it was decided that, due to the Cask & Still's imminent demise ( it may or may not still be open in December but definitely won't be in January), a new venue needed to be chosen for next month's meeting. The consensus was to move to the Edward Wyllie in Bothwell St. This is a Wetherspoon's pub, with lots of room, no music, real ale, and food till quite late. http://www.jdwetherspoon.co.uk/pubs/pub-details.php?PubNumber=2301 This will be Trout's venue for the foreseeable future.
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reddragdiva
| 10:56 pm - From the one that cut you.
The IT dept say my Ubuntu laptop will cause "broadcast storms and spanning tree collapses." It's not entirely clear how a device on a single connection can cause a spanning tree to collapse; we'll be asking for a detailed technical explanation. We did ask if it "might induce a FUDstorm." We know they run Ubuntu themselves. My boss is defending this assiduously — "we're a Unix department, a Unix laptop is appropriate, Windows isn't" — mostly because he'd quite like Ubuntu himself, as would several others in the department.
I have new headphones. Skullcandy Ink'd. Apparently they are hip with the kids. Also decent headphones. Wish I'd gotten ones with a side-entry plug. Also, left and right aren't marked. Very good noise blocking for the Victoria Line.
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news
[theljstaff]
 | 01:53 pm - LiveJournal Major Notes: Notes, Tweaks, Bug Kills, LJ_Cares!
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!
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November 11th, 2009
rufus
| 11:42 pm - Photographs, a love story
Everything I know about photography I learned from four places:
1. My high school photography teacher;
2. Donna, the photo-editor at the community newspaper I worked for;
3. Nathanial Hawthorne;
4. The Dogma school of film-making
The first two are the most simple and obvious, and are where I learned the basics of technique. I had approximately one semester of formal instruction and dark room time, and have only a rudimentary grasp of the inner workings of the camera. A good deal of what I'm doing these days is learning how everything works.
When I worked for the paper, I was given the task of photographing the houses I was covering; basically they had zero budget and the photographers largely hated real estate shoots. In the year or so I was there, I used two different $25 point-and-shoot cameras I had bought at Wal-Mart, and they published my pictures in the paper, frequently on the front of the real estate section. (Three houses sold off the cover that I know of.) This is the source of my ongoing fascination with interiors. I used to hang around the photo area and absorb whatever Donna had to say. #1 Useful tidbit: Don't take boring pictures. People receiving awards or making speeches? Usually boring. Bread and butter, for a community paper, but dull. But really you can making nearly anything tedious. Be active; look for your shots. Don't take boring pictures unless that's all you have.
Which brings us to #3. Yes, really, Nathanial Hawthorne. It was something one my professor said when we read The Scarlet Letter: Pay attention to the way he uses light. And he (Hawthorne) does, indeed, have a particular affinity for light: candle light and sunlight, the lack of light and the particular feeling one has, standing beneath the canopy of trees in a silent wood, dappled by sunlight.
I connect that thread, perhaps tenuously, to the ethos of the Dogma school of filmmaking , in the sense that my rules are as follows:
1. Use only the light you have;
2. Take only the shots you are given.
And now, a brief retropspective:
Let us begin in 1996, when I went traveling around Europe with a friend, my camera, and several rolls of film:
A castle and an anonymous business building, Swansea, Wales, March, 1996. I liked the contrast of the new and old. Overall, I like this picture. Today I probably would have gotten closer and framed it more tightly. There's a lot of unnecessary business in the foreground.
( More, with commentary. )
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lj_maintenance
[dwell]
 | 02:00 pm - Network Maintenance: Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 04:00-06:00 UTC/GMT
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 mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!
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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.
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November 10th, 2009
rufus
| 11:57 pm - New York Botanical Garden
The last time I was there was roughly 8 years ago, and much deeper into the winter. Last time I was on a date; this time I voyaged up with sola and some of her friends to catch the Japanese Winter Garden before it's taken down, never to be seen again. We also took in some traditional Japanese drumming. All in all, a most excellent Saturday afternoon.
( Blooms and tiny teiko boys and girls. )
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reddragdiva
| 11:35 pm - Sunny afternoon.
Sunday I went to the Pembury with nyecamden. He fed me. The new laptop and its remarkable lightness attracted much attention.
This evening I went to a museum computer people meetup that got slightly overwhelmed by Wikipedians. Productive and good, I think! Photos to come, if we ever find the XD-card reader. We refrained from entering the pub quiz, it really isn't fair to let Wikipedians into those.
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aidan_skinner
| 03:21 pm - git find
This is mostly for my own benefit so that I can quickly find it again, but a while back my esteemed (former at the time, now current) coworker cooked up this little bit of git magic on his twitter, in .gitconfig:
[alias]
find = !sh -c 'git ls-files |grep --color=always -i "$@" |less -FRSX'
which then lets you do things like:
git find SomeTest.java
without having to remember all the src/java/test/org/foo/project/bar/baz/ junk. Most handy.
- Aidan
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November 9th, 2009
clockworksaint
 | 07:01 pm - Scribblenauts
I spent a while playing Scribblenauts recently. For those not familiar with it, it's a game for the Nintendo DS where you solve puzzles by writing out the names of objects you'd like and then using them to achieve some goal, such as guiding home a lost cow, jump-starting a car or saving a princess from a witch. I'm still not sure what I think of it. To begin with it's amazing. You imagine something that would be useful, write it in and it appears! The game knows a surprising number of words. My problem is that after a while I find that although there are a huge number of different items, I can't find all that many different strategies for the situations it keeps putting you in.
( Read more... )
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November 8th, 2009
silentq
 | 11:25 pm - NaDruWriNi followup
I think the problem was drinking the two cocktails in rapid succession. I've had two drinks today, but one at around 6pm or so and one at 10pm to help with the NaNoing and I'm fine now. As I told cris after I collapsed in giggles, when I ask him if I should have a second drink, the answer should be "no". :) I stayed tipsy all through the party that I attended last night, sticking with ice water while I was there and having many babbly conversations. :)
I did manage to take some pictures of our costumes before we headed out, using the auto timer. I didn't try to do the neck scars after the utter failure last weekend.
Skirt made from this pattern (walking length), jacket drafted from instructions in this book (with lots of cursing, you'd think an updated edition would fix the mistakes in the original), scarf made by making a rolled hem around two sewn together pieces of red silk. If you click through to the three picture gallery, I left the blurry first one in because it pretty much captured how I felt after two cocktails last night. :)
NaNoWriMo word count: 14636
Current Music: somafm.com Suburbs of Goa
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