Sorry it's been a few days, I got a bit of freelance and it's hard not to take advantage of the few hours in the day when I have no distractions ( Read more... )

THESE ARE NOT "PLUSHIES"
THEY ARE FIGURINES, AS STATED ON THE ITEM PAGE



http://patchtogether.com/store/store/view/id/172

my TUBE FERRET design made it through voting and is now up for SALE! 4" tall figure, your choice of SABLE/BROWN or WHITE, for only $14.95 each -- the cheapest toy available on patchtogether! i wanted to keep them simple so the price would be LOW LOW LOW, so i hope you guys are happy with the price the guys over at patchtogether have gone with!

this is a PRE-ORDER item and will not ship for 2+ months. once i've reached 20 orders, they will create a prototype for you to see [i'm halfway there already]. patchtogether DOES NOT accept paypal, sorry! your card WILL NOT BE CHARGED UNTIL THE TOY SHIPS.

YEAH!!! thanks to everyone who voted! this is so awesome!! i'm gonna do a DANCE!

So, another long workweek is finally drawing to a close, and I've got a weekend to look forward to.

Except now I'm all stressing out because people are trying to make weekend plans, and... I dunno, it's just stressing me out for some reason. Like the last thing I want to do is get stuck committing even more of my time and resources to doing things. Feels too much like work.

You can tell your brain is fried when you can't even relax properly.

This is a call out to someone out there who recently wrote to me about doing them a sketch to be delivered at MWFF (not you Shyfox!). At any rate,my email pooped me and \i lost a number of emails. I want to do your sketch but you need to remail me the details (assuming you read my \lj). If so, send it to me at heatherbruton(at)gmail.com. thanks!

Update. Obviously I just needed to post about. Found it!

I just made some awesome pumpkin muffins. The pumpkin puree was fresh, which may have been part of it. And I found a new-to-me recipe blog that looks fun: smittenkitchen.com

Then there was a little pumpkin puree left - only about 1/2 a cup. But I didn't want to waste fresh pumpkin goodness! So I made a small pot of soup, loosely working from an online recipe. I sauteed up some chopped onion and minced fresh ginger in butter, threw in the pumpkin and a little bit of bouillon. Added a little bit of apple grape juice just to give it a bit of sweetness (though I didn't really taste that in the end), pulled it off the stove and added a little half-and-half.

Pureeing the whole mess would have been better - it was more of a pumpkin onion soup - but it was very tasty.

Now I'm getting around to actual dinner. And after that, I think I will go collapse, kthxbye.

Still, mmmmmmmm. Pumpkiny fall goodness. And the weather's cooled down to the 50s, too, to top it all off.

eta: And we decided to light a fire but forgot to open the flue, so the smoke alarm went off. *facepalm* Why, yes, fifty degrees is cold enough for a fire in Florida. :-)

(Dave is at a conference atm. He would likely not have forgotten.)

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!

For folks who are going to Midwest Furfest, and who might be interested, I'm actually going to be on two panels this year! Both of these tie back in to my storytelling nature.

Here's the rundown:

Sofawolf Preview Reading: (Friday, 3:00pm, Willow A)
I'm going to be reading a preview from my upcoming novel, The Seventh Chakra, which is slated for release at Further Confusion in January. This book has been a long time in the making, and I'm really excited about finally getting to share it with folks. Also at the Preview Reading will a chapter of kyellgold's upcoming novel Shadow of the Father (also due to be released in January).

Story Hour: (Saturday, 4:00pm, Maple)
Sort of inspired by the storytelling podcast "The Moth," Malin, fuzzwolf and myself will each be telling some stories. I did this last year, too, and it was really fun and went over pretty well. I've got a different story queued up for this year, and I'm looking forward to the other stories that'll be told, as well.

Anyhow, it's nothing super-flashy, but hey, neither of them conflict with mealtimes or dances, so stop on by! I might send out reminders through that new-fangled Twitter thang while I'm there, too, if folks want to wrangle up attendees.

Looking forward to a fun con!

It is not tomato juice, that's all I can tell you.

For those that haven't heard yet....my father passed away suddenly yesterday morning which is why I haven't been around much lately. Keeping low key and spending time over at my parents' place with family. Services and viewing will be tomorrow. Up to this point I've been avoiding thinking about it much. Distracting myself best I can with friends, TV, whatever. Everyone has been wonderful and indeed a great help, but at the viewing there won't be anywhere left to hide. Time to face the reality of it all, pay my respects and hopefully find closure with the suddenness of his death. Not a day any of us are looking forward to.

I love you dad.

Okay, serious question:

Assuming I were able to get tickets, would there be any local Bay Area peeps at all interested in going to see Lady GaGa in San Francisco on December 13th or 14th?

This comes with the knowledge that said tickets would not necessarily be super-cheap, might not be great seats, and that availability might dictate needing to buy them soon.

Seriously. Let me know.

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.