For the first time in Dog knows how long I had a relatively lazy weekend.

Went out to a bar Friday night. Helped folks move, rode the moto some and hit a birthday dinner Saturday. Sunday I hardly got out of bed.

Calm before the ass-sodomy storm. :D

givesushope
It's that glorious time of year when we reunite with loved ones (we neglected all year), stuff our faces to excess, and pass out in front of the TV. Perhaps a recalibration of the thanksometer is in order. A spin-off of the popular GivesMeHope.com site, this community invites you to document moments of kindness, generosity, and pure human love in 350 words or less.

veggieslackers
Despite its mainstream appeal, Thanksgiving is not for everyone. There are those struggling with food disorders, for whom this day causes endless conflict. There are the cash-challenged, who can't afford the gluttony we've grown to expect. There are the lonely, who don't have loved ones nearby. And let's not forget the vegetarians, who decry the animal cruelty. But there's one more group we often overlook: the terminally lazy! This community of lazy vegetarians offers easy recipes for an animal-friendly feast.

fashin
Just in time for holiday shopping season, this fashionista community brings you the world of haute couture in the form of sumptuous photos, video clips, and candid commentary. There's also a sugary sprinkle of mainstream movie discussions and debates on such pressing social issues as manicure styles and celebrity colonics. If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.

No president can give you anything unless they first take it from somebody else, and that is a formula for failure.

Or so claim conservatives. The reality is that freedoms and liberty are not taken. They are not something you can get by taking them from someone else. These things are given from one person to another and they are in abundance.

I've been reading and listening to arguments lately, specifically about nationalised health care, and it occurs to me that the conservative worldview is one that believes that in order to give freedoms to one group of people, they must be taken from someone else. For instance, in the health care debate, Michigan congressman Rogers says:


( It is not like taking a piece of pie from one person and giving it to another; there is enough pie for all )

When people spout fallacies as if they were concrete fact being dropped on the opposition.

I really want to correct this person but I know when to pick my battles so I'm going to set this one aside.

So while cleaning my chain this morning I realized I'm about to roll over 25K on the bike. Wuf got the bike with 9K, put on about 7.5K before I took it over.

So in a first season I've logged around 8.5K. If the season keeps on drag-assing along, might break 9K.

Still have my brain and appendages. I call that a win :)

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!

[ … ] The archdiocese's statement follows a vote Tuesday by the council's Committee on Public Safety and the Judiciary to reject an amendment that would have allowed individuals, based on their religious beliefs, to decline to provide services for same-sex weddings.

"Lets say an individual caterer is a staunch Christian and someone wants him to do a cake with two grooms on top," said council member Yvette M. Alexander (D-Ward 6), the sponsor of the amendment. "Why can't they say, based on their religious beliefs, 'I can't do something like that'?" [ … ]

You can't do that because it's Discrimination.

It's the same thing as discrimination based on skin colour. Everyone knows it's not okay to say, “I don't want to serve you because your skin color is different than mine, and the bible says your skin colour makes you inferior.” And it's just as silly as saying, “I don't want to serve you because you're lefthanded,” (though that is a bit of a sinister example).

(via The Washington Post)

Sorry for the untimely nature of this post. Between recovery, work and MFF fun I've been far from LJ-inclined.

Friday was my official birthday. I'm an old(er) fart now. Since I have an amazing and understanding boyfriend, he said I could go out and be a deviant Friday night and have my birthday party Saturday night. So Friday, after work, I met up with folks to attend MIR (Mr. Intl Rubber for those of pure mind and body) events in the city. Ended up grabbing dinner with friends and then heading to Cell Block. Had an absolutely amazing time. Thanks jet_der_hundfor giving crash space to the drunk, old mutt!

Saturday morning I woke up relatively early, rode back to the burbs, said hello to my AMAZING boyfriend (who was already starting to cook for the evening's party), showered, changed and then headed back into the city after changing out the battery in the moto. I toured MIR's market for some time, resisting blowing the paycheck on hotness and instead finding a pretty awesome used Orca wetsuit that was in pristine shape. I feel better spending on things that serve a dual purpose (at least that helps me sleep at night). Eventually I made it back home, cleaned the house as wuf was passed out in bed, and got everything ready for the party. The party was atypically awesome. For some reason or another everything seemed to flow quite nicely throughout the night. We had plenty of food, beer, fire and "fuk u dolphins!!!". Thanks to everyone who showed up, thanks for all the fantastic booze and gifts (except for Street - your 40oz sucked :P) and thanks to my wonderful wufwuf for all the cooking and hard work you put into the fiesta!

Sunday we reluctantly woke up early to prep for a group ride with folks. 65F and sun IN NOVEMBER?? It was crazy nice and we got in a really good ride before the ground turns white. We went straight from the group ride to the last MFF meeting before the con :X The finish line is in sight. So after meeting fun, wuf and I headed downtown to meet up with the MIR crew again. Wuf was exhausted from the weekend's activities and worried about Chaos getting into post-party goodies, so he ended up calling it a night early. I decided to say in town and eventually made it to Sidetracks for Rubber + Showtunes night. Still sporting my 1-piece leathers, I kinda stood out like a sore thumb, but it's funny how many guys put moves on you if your bike is rockstar parked in front of the club. I got hit on a ton, told people I was already taken a ton and refused to take people on rides a ton :P It was a very flattering night and I had fun watching all my pervy friends get absolutely blasted on purples, reds and oranges. 

Because I am old and crap, it took me a bit to recover from all the fun. However, I've been joining wuf at Bally's now and digging into a pretty serious routine; much moreso than in workouts past. I'm even tracking my routines on my superior phone product! As much as working out at home was fine for minor things, I am glad he encouraged me to go ahead and take a plunge back into gym work. It's been touch and go finding machines that don't aggravate my back issues, but there should be plenty for me to break myself on :)

Thanks again everyone for all the bday wishes!

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!

---

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.

Hey!

So yeah, been down and what not. FUKC IT! I'm going to cheer the fuck up if it kills me. :P


And guess what... Yeah, New Hey Fox posted today!

A reminder: This is not actually how things went down, but it's close enough for Fox's world. :: grin :: Today's comic is, I think, genuinely funny. Yay for not being 100% mopey and whiney huh? ^.^

By the way. I'm trying for NaNoWriMo again this year. I haven't posted about my novel yet, but I'll put up a excerpt soon. If you wanna keep track than hit the link, and if your participating too than go ahead and let me know so we can do that whole friend link thing.

Yeah..

So That's it for now.

Later!

It occurs to me that our culture is based entirely around the evacuation of waste, but it's something no one wants to talk about it. More than religion, more than culture, the driving force behind technical innovation and growth as a species is finding new and different ways and places to take a poo, from a hole in the woods to an outhouse to indoor plumbing. If there is one defining thing we have as a culture, it is the fact that, at one time or another, we have all had to poop.

A table of places people have taken a poo:
• In the woods
• Behind the shack
• In the bathroom
• In space
• On the moon
• Around the corner
• At the Gas-station
• At a restaurant
• And many, many other places


If you think about it, even momentarily, it makes a lot of sense. Every building people like or work in has a bathroom — many have more than one — all for eliminating waste product. There are more bathrooms than churches and shrines — there are even bathrooms in churches, and every culture has created a toilet in similar fashion. Our buildings and culture are based around the need to evacuate waste. We have more toilets than churches.

More than that, cultures that are considered "higher" are the ones with more sophisticated means of pooping. The Romans were civilised and they had running water to get rid of their waste. The middle ages were a step back, and people lived in squalor and filth lined the streets. Modern plumbing has made cities possible, but it wasn't until indoor plumbing and toilets that carriers of disease and pestilence are almost completely eliminated — when a seasonal flu is all you have to worry about, life is pretty good and your society is clean.

Even our language is structured around it, but has built up the elimination of waste from our bodies — a very natural thing — into a taboo subject. The words "poop" and "pee" are hilarious to small children (don't tell me you didn't giggle at them, too, because you did). The words "shit," "piss," "crap," and "ass" have all become dirty words. People don't say that they are going to poop — they say that they are going to go "use the bathroom" or "go number two," as if they are ashamed of a perfectly natural process. The fact is that there is nothing to be ashamed of — it's natural and everyone does it. It's not good or bad — it simply is, and it's a commonality among all humanity, yet we still seem reluctant to acknowledge that any of us do it.

In fact, to make words for natural acts into taboos is to give power to these words and to say that these things are bad, when they're not. Even calling waste management "number one" and "number two" is silly. It also presents a layer of abstraction to the whole mess that is difficult for small children to understand.

Pooping is simply a fact of life. If you're alive, you poop. It's that simple. Let's not glorify it by making up fancy words or using euphemisms for it.

“I did not mean to write an essay detailing all the ways in which slider controls in Photoshop CS4 reveal problems in the design, development, quality control, and management of the product; I really didn’t. I just pulled up the Smart Sharpen dialog one evening and, sighing at its hideousness for the nth time, decided to put together a little joke post. That was all.”

I know exactly how that is. Sometimes you just have to act on the feeling — you can't rest till you do.

Neven Morgen via Daring Fireball

Sorry I am a bit behind replying to folks from over the weekend. I basically was busy, partying my ass off, riding the moto, in meetings, hanging with amazing friends or being a pervert the ENTIRE weekend.

More details later once I recover from the fun, but I wanted to thank everyone who helped make this a quite memorable weekend. Hopefully I'll actually have time to check over all of this tonight if my brain and body allow.

You guys are awesome!

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.

This quarter has been busy. Very busy. I'm taking 17 credithours. It's intense. And I've been busy outside of class.

Anyway, I got back to my room a couple hours ago after heading to town. I went to 1) drop of a disc of pictures, 2) get some new jeans! and 3) setup a computer for my dad.


The first is a series of pictures I took for a sculptor on the dedication of her statue, which looks something like this (I'm not good at making up names. Also, I think that the photos should stand on their own without needing a title, only a description of when and where):


Except for the above, the pictures in this post are unrelated to the content, simply recent uploads I want to share, so it's pretty as you scroll by, like the next one below (which I suppose is also the only other exception) and is larger because it is more stunning that way (seriously, it's more stunning the bigger it is; making it small gets rid of the Depth of Field):



The second are a pair of Levi 501s and a pair of 505s. Classic blue denim. They'll last a year each before the knees get holy like the pair they replace, like the pair that replaced the one before it, like the pair those replaced …


Three: My dad has a great MacBook Pro. It's better than mine, as well as quieter when running Flash. It runs OSX. He recently also started a job as a realtor, and many of the websites he needs to use are the sort that require IE. I tried every free option I could think of: I tried Safari, Firefox, Opera, and even IE for Mac (5.2; it sucked even back in the day when it was the only Mac OS browser). I tried spoofing the user agent strings. I even tried using WINE and running IE through that, but that didn't work either. It was crashy — too crashy for even me to use. I finally gave up after I was unable to get a virtual machine to do the trick, recommending Parallels as an option (I wanted it to be mobile, and there was no way in hell I was giving him back his old laptop — it was too slow and too loud.

I went home this evening to drop off the aforementioned disc, got two pairs of jeans, and a tasty salmon dinner. At home, I dredged up an old desktop machine (slimline tower), because this seemed like a decent solution. I had a computer in the basement, as well as an extra keyboard and monitor (one of my two 19" Samsung SXGA TFTs), so I set him up with a 2.0 Ghz Celeron "Northwood" running Win 7. I had a bit of trouble getting the first drive to boot, so I replaced it with something newer. It's an adequate, functional computer and runs 7 just fine, if a little sluggish — but it's better than XP by leaps and bounds. It'll do the job of printing and accessing ActiveX websites, and it was a problem taken care of with parts I had on hand.

Also a new addition, I got a replacement for my crappy RAZR (which was stolen). I used my backup Nokia 1208 for a couple weeks, but I now have a 2007 HTC T-Mobile Shadow, care of kistaro. It's a good phone, and my first experience with Windows Mobile (apart from playing with my ex's WM5 Motorola Q briefly a couple years ago, but that was a poor experience to say the least). It's slick, but it's been easy to get used to.

It has good battery life with an extra large 3rd party battery, wi-fi for email (my router's WiFi magically started working again, AND I got the G router I was lent working as an access point tied to my hub), and is a decent crossover device. Actually, it's much nicer than the BlackBerry Perl with which I started this contract — faster, more intuitive, more versatile, and more useful, and while it does have a little bit of chunky and clunky, I'm getting more used to the interface; it has its quirks, but it's nothing that I can't ignore as a developer. It's no iPhone, but it's not supposed to be — it does its job just fine, has no touch screen, and does my Email. It can even automatically switch from "normal" to "vibrate" modes based on my calendar.

Actually, I've found that the killer app for it is Google's sync. Google employs an exchange server to copy contacts, calendars, and send and receive email, so moving into the new phone was as easy as setting up Google as an exchange server and BAM! all my contacts and my inbox are there on my phone. I read a message and it marks it read in my inbox. Since I use Gmail's IMAP server for my desktop client, it means that all changes propagate across all devices. Even better than that is the fact that I have iCal linked with Google Calendars via WebDAV, and Address Book syncs to Google as well, so I add a contact on my phone, and he or she appears on my computer. Honestly, this is exactly how computing is supposed to be.

Additionally, it would have been an absolute nightmare trying to coerce Windows Mobile into syncing with anything non-windows-mobile, since I'm almost exclusively Mac/linux.

So, I've been using it to stream internet radio while I sleep (a laptop is overkill for this), and I've got an ebook reader installed on it, too (the Window Mobile version is much nicer than the BlackBerry one). It used to be so nice to be able to have books with me on the bus — especially since I don't like carrying many things with me, and when the Blackberry died, so did a lot of the reading I did for pleasure. Now I can finally fall asleep again reading stories about Honor Harrington and the Star Kingdom of Mantacore.

So, yeah, Windows Mobile doesn't suck — and this is coming from a Mac/Linux user and a design geek (so it's as close to a ringing endorsement as you'll get from me without torturing me with a BB Storm). Believe it!

Not that anyone cares, but today I did manage to make the banner for my last ddr mix.



Brawl drew me a icon a while back, then it hit me it would look kick ass for the final banner. So a few moments later, done. Mostly been all I could do today. Been worried about Banin. I think he's getting better. No accidents or anything today *crosses fingers* God, if I'm like this when my dog is sick, I dunno what I'll be like when my kid is sick.

Off to bed and to start another wonderful work week...
And as much as I still kinda hate having to go in, I'm so happy I do get to go in. I have odd feelings.

Because the dog is getting a bit old.

This is no ordinary Friday.

This is the Friday that perro  turns 31!  Congratulations mutty, hope you have a great b-day.  I love you hon!

Everyone make sure they wish Perro a happy birthday, with special attention paid to just how old he is now:D

Love you babe :)  <3