Below are the most recent 8 friends' journal entries.

Thursday, November 12th, 2009
news [ theljstaff ]	1:53p	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 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! (111 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
lj_maintenance [ dwell ]	2:00p	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! --- 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. (38 Comments |Comment on this)
thegameiam	12:55a	Ideals I just finished two books, and was surprised that they both touched on some of the same themes. Manliness, by the amusingly-named Harvey Mansfield, is not a self-discovery book, although it's shelved with them. Mansfield's thesis is that not much effort has been put into defining and characterizing manliness - both the positive and negative aspects of it. His approach passes the sniff test with regard to the inherent contradictions in the gender-neutral society, and several chapters are spent in a philosophical review of the philosophical underpinnings of feminism and its development. In truth, this is a book of philosophy. He makes a pretty coherent case that many of the approaches taken by those thinkers at the core of the feminist movement were less about changing the roles that men and women had and more about attacking the idea of roles at all - he shows the thread of will-to-power thinking from Nietzsche to de Beauvoir. One refreshing aspect of this book is that it serves as a refresher survey in a large number of philosophical approaches. I liked his concluding approach (based on John Stuart Mill) that the best way to address society in general on this topic is to increase the distance between public and private behavior and expectations. While his tone fluctuates from conversational to pedantic, I think this is still a pretty good book. He did make a connection that I hadn't thought of previously in a throwaway line - Darwinian evolution can be understood as a market-based approach to understanding speciation and diversity: neat! I also finished both volumes of The New Frontier, and it lives up to its hype. This is great superhero storytelling, and it would be at home in any list of the best comic stories ever. However, the interesting thread which tied these together for me is the heroic ideal - much the way Bill Willingham approached the heroic, Darwyn Cooke and Mansfield both assert that the true measure of heroism is not lack of fear, but the act of rising above it. There is something manly about most classic superheroes, but it's hard to quite put my finger on precisely what it is. ==== Sarah's still suffering from GI-crud, so I stayed up to make both chicken soup and applesauce, and I think the soup is ready to go away now... Current Mood: tired Current Music: Paco de Lucia, "Mantilla de Feria" (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 8th, 2009
thegameiam	1:09p	Reverse Order Today, I painted another coat on my door (finally), and so I get to wait until it dries to close it. I was hoping to go on a pre-veterans' day program, but Sarah's doing a GI-routine, and there's no lock. So I'm home for a bit... ==== Last night, we went to the wedding of one of my cousins to a delightful woman, and it was lovely. (Better: this is one of my gentile cousins marrying another gentile! Rare and shocking - I've said before that my family is the intermarriage problem). The location was unusual: the Mansion House of the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore. Coming after Shabbat, we were late, so we missed the penguin (which apparently bit my mother and grandmother). Everything about the whole affair was classy and unpretentious, much like the couple themselves, and I wish them all the happiness that can come with marriage. It's a great institution, and I'm glad to see them institutionalized. (rimshot) ==== We spent shabbat in Kemp Mill with some long-time friends, and we got so see a bunch of folks we haven't seen in a very long time. Kemp Mill is pretty much where a large number of the community end up once they have children, and the best thing about it is the large number of old friends. However, it's very, very suburban - no sidewalks, and other than the shul, pretty much nothing is walking distance. The synagogue (KMS) and community seem very oriented and geared toward raising children: to a person, every one of our old friends who we saw there are parents. Day school tuition and the inherent insanity of it were major topics (one year of a mid-priced Jewish high school costs more than my entire college education). There was a bar mitzvah (this is common enough that the "Yankees win!" kiddush is getting put off to December...), so the kid gave the sermon and it was pretty decent for a 13-year-old. I was surprised at how cavernous the main sanctuary is: I had a hard time not just hearing the sermon, but also when the Rabbi spoke, and it didn't seem to just be me - kaddish was thoroughly out-of-synch. The sheer number of children running around at any time was stunning to me: I know intellectually that lots of people have lots of kids, but seeing them racing around that much (the image should be "pack of Tazmanian Devils") was unexpected. I can't for the life of me figure out why nobody has made sidewalks a crusade: here is this community which has oriented its priorities toward raising children, and in fact it isn't actually safe to go anywhere. Worse, given the size of the Orthodox population, there are huge numbers of people walking in the street on Friday night and Saturday morning. And of course it's dark. If I lived there, I would make it a priority to have sidewalks installed - or at least the asphalt pathways like those on college campuses: the danger of breaking an ankle is a lot better than the danger of getting run over. ==== Why is netflix awesome? Because this week, we watched The Lost Room, and it was phenomenal. I've rarely been so completely hooked and transfixed by television. Sarah and I were strongly reminded of a higher-budget version of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. All of the characters were believable (!) and there is a strong Monkey's Paw component to it. It's so good that we gave it 5 stars, and it might need to be part of our permanent collection. ==== We had gotten our free theatre tickets, and used them to go to 26 Miles last Tuesday. It's a road trip between an estranged mother and daughter, and it's excellent. The WaPo review is decent, but I disagree with their characterization of the male roles as "thin"; the moment that I was hooked was the encounter with the tamale vendor (about 1/3 of the way in). I don't think I've encountered a more true description of how cooking is an aspect of love - the poetry of his words brought tears to my eyes. At that moment, I was hooked: I identified painfully with the parental estrangement brought on by divorce, and the whole night was draining emotionally. Strike that: not draining, but cathartic. This play does what only very good drama can do: it says true things with just enough distance that an audience member can identify with the story and actually go through the emotional journey. I highly recommend this play. Current Mood: busy Current Music: Rush - Losing It | Powered by Last.fm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
news [ theljstaff ]	1:15p	LiveJournal Major Notes: Spam counter-attack, RSS feeds again, CSI Deadly Intent contest 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... ) (220 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 1st, 2009
thegameiam	7:11p	Something new for today It turns out I've been making a couple of incorrect berakhot (blessings) for a long time. I regularly eat puffed wheat (yum!) for breakfast. I had always (heh - by "always" I mean "for the last 12 years") thought that puffed wheat would get the blessing mezonot beforehand and al hamihyah afterwards. Well, when I went to find out the blessing for puffed kamut (everyone needs a change, right?), I learned that I should have been saying adama beforehand and borey nefashot afterwards. It turns out that the former combination is for grain products not the grains themselves - much like hagefen is for wine, not grapes. Old dogs, new tricks, and all that... Current Mood: cheerful Current Music: Creedence Clearwater Revival, "Pagan Baby" (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 31st, 2009
thegameiam	10:30p	Saying it better than I can I've been pretty appalled at the Obama administration's conduct with regard to Fox news. I see this as an example of Nixonian enemies-list-style politics, and it's frustrating that nobody seems to have reminded the President that he isn't the president of half the country: he's the president of the whole country, which include lots of folks who will disagree with this or that, and many who might not even be polite about their disagreement. In the Examiner, Dennis Miller says it a lot better than I do. Now that is how the smack is laid down. Current Mood: sleepy Current Music: Bela Fleck, "Four Wheel Drive" (13 Comments |Comment on this)
thegameiam	8:05p	Musings on a night with extra silly For the life of me, I don't understand what would possess otherwise sane people to drive into Georgetown on Halloween - 3/4 of the streets are blocked, and the ones that aren't are choked with cars and half-drunk folks dressed as RoboCop. Then again, maybe that's the attraction... ====== When I walked home after shul this morning, I passed Commander Salamander, a local punk accessory store which normally has mannequins in the bay windows, and I noticed that they had changed from a week ago. And then one of them waved and winked at me. I about jumped out of my skin - it was an "is this Amsterdam?" moment, but it cracked me up for a few hours. She was dressed in the "Halloween sultry" style - more "bad girl devil" than anything truly sinister... ====== Foxfier pointed me to this post about the origins of a Scottish custom, and it got me thinking about some of my Halloween angst. I've been in the "Halloween is a terrible thing" camp for years now - I've had letters published attacking it, and have been one of the iconoclasts standing athwart the tide of custom in every venue in which I've found myself. Sarah has largely put up with this: she considers Halloween harmless fun, and in fact has True Blood-style fangs in at this moment (I tease her by implying that she's sparkly like the Twilight vampires). Part of my reticence about this comes from a reasoned critique of Halloween - the symbolism of going begging door to door, with the implied if not actualized threat "trick or treat." Another part of my reticence comes from my rejection of all things pagan - my conversion to Judaism is an explicit rejection of the polytheism and loose morality (let alone their shaky grasp of historical evidence) that I had encountered among the neopagans. I'm pretty much alone among the people whom I know in that I have in fact actually smashed idols. In my case, they were my own (my father had a bunch of my stuff in his garage that he wanted me to take, and among them were my idols and altars - a sledgehammer made very satisfying work of this), and I really understand aleinu when it talks about detestable idolatry being removed from the world. But perhaps I've gone too far in this - by treating this as something to oppose, do I strengthen it? Do I provide legitimacy to that which is inherently manufactured via misunderstanding? Maybe I should just have an absinthe and relax - the over and undertones which are present aren't that serious - certainly Halloween as practiced in Georgetown bears exactly zero resemblance to an actual pagan celebration (whether the actual one or the neopagan versions of the touchy-feely-one). Food for some thought for me. Current Mood: thoughtful Current Music: Steven Lynch, "Taxi Driver" (1 Comment |Comment on this)