This is getting REALLY old.

I'm scheduled to return to work on Monday and woke up today feeling like death warmed over would be a big improvement.

Blech!

I've found that flipping pages in a song book and trying to play whatever chord progressions come up lets me get some guitar practice even when my creative energy is non-existent. In that mood, I came across Teen Angel. I've always been bothered by the song without thinking too much of why...and not just for its idiot plot.

( Far more analysis than the subject deserves )

Of course, the real point of this is that a song should be consistent about its setting and its references to people and things. The other point is that you can break those rules and still make a fortune in royalties. [sigh]

Absolutely bang on post about the author/agent relationship from seanan_mcguire.

Of authors and agents -take two.

My agent works his butt off for everyone he represents. He works constantly to expand our markets and he worries about not only the big things but the little details that, without him, would slip through the cracks. I've been with him for all but my first three books -- and he still deals with the detritus of those, that's how good he is -- and I wouldn't have the career I have without him.

Thank you, Joshua.

A very happy birthday to tuto!

Apparently my brain has had enough of writing parody lyrics for now. The last few attempts have gone nowhere, and the beating of dead horses has never appealed to me. (Hmmm. The Tell-Tale Horse?)

Anyway, I learned a few new tricks and life can now go back to my current version of normal. For anyone masochistic enough -- who may still be reading -- here are some ideas and snippets that didn't get a full song treatment:

( Bits and pieces )

I love my son. Just sayin'.

:-D

From dorktowerfeed:

( Comic back here )

My physiotherapist graduated me to "the machine" yesterday, having me starting to work with a series of pulleys and weights. I gather the two physio guys are pleased with my flexibility progress, but want to try and step up my strength development. It's still just over-half of what it needs to be, but improving. I'm working with the -blue- theraputty now, which is the second most difficult firmness. I'm also working with thicker and more demanding resistance bands, too.

My arm -really- feels it today. Of course, I also played John at both Wii golf and tennis early last night :).

And I'm slowly trying to get back to the guitar again. It's encouraging that I can play most simple chords now even without the muscle-relaxing water treatment with much less pain than when I was playing guitar a few weeks ago. I'm still limiting my practice to about ten minutes a day right now as it does still hurt (and I still have a ton of other physio execises to do nightly, too).

I was asked yesterday if my class can prepare some Christmas songs to add to the Kindergarten classes, who always put on a Christmas Concert in late December. I said yes and I'm trying to strategize how to best handle the songs this year. I need about four performance pieces, plus a sing-a-long at the end. The Gr. 6 teacher who plays piano says she'll accompany the sing-a-long, which is a relief. My aim is going to be to be able to play guitar on two of the performance pieces and hopefully my arm will be up to it by then. I'm also going to get the kids to do an instrumental on the boomwhackers (which was a big hit last Christmas). I'm going to approach their French teacher about doing a song, too. I'm also looking into karaoke Christmas CDs just in case my arm still isn't up to guitaring, which I hope won't be the case!

Having finished conferring and hobnobbing with my colleague in India, I am now going to join my wife in bed. *sigh*

Well, at least I'm officially on convention time now, because I am not getting up early tomorrow morning...

I was distracted during the early morning, too tired around lunch time, and am currently uninspired. Tonight involves Flash Forward, if nothing else. If the parody string continues today, it will be a surprise to me.

On the other hand, I just have to share a line from an old song, one I've been familiar with for over forty years, yet one that I never considered before in a literal way:
"If I had my choice of matter, I would rather be with cats."

I'm not sure which is more interesting, choosing matter or being with cats, but doesn't that just call out for...something?

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!

daisy_knotwise has decided that it is time for Katie to have a haircut. Given that she'll be three years old next week and hasn't yet had one, I suppose she's correct. I especially suppose she's correct given how little Katie likes to have her hair washed and brushed.

But I recall how my father used to cut our hair. One false move and it was time for a crew cut.

I'm hoping Katie didn't squirm too much.

Because it is two days until WindyCon, I should have expected that the hard drive in my main home machine -- the one with all the interesting data on it, including the Girl Genius presentation that I spent two hours working on last night -- would pick this moment to fail. *sigh*

Fortunately, that hard drive is part of a mirrored pair, so I've recovered the presentation from the working drive and will shut this down in just a minute. Then it's off to Fry's to buy another drive to replace the dead one.

I didn't have the hour to spare, but I surely don't have the data to spare.

For those interested, I’m posting daily NaNoWriMo comics over at Inkygirl.com. You can see an index of all of them so far at http://www.inkygirl.com/tag/nanotoon/.

Mirrored from Debbie's Blatherings.

For those interested, I’ve posted a comic strip review of THE UNFINISHED ANGEL by Sharon Creech.

Mirrored from Debbie's Blatherings.

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.

When I got my poppy from the veteran standing outside the grocery store, it occurred to me that he couldn't possibly be a WWII vet. He was the age I always remember poppy sellers being -- but I'm a lot older now so I'm guessing Korea. My father fought in Korea.

According to Wikipedia, of the 65,038,810 people who were members of the armed forces of one of the combat nations, there are three verified World War I veterans still living -- two are 108, one is 109 -- as well as a 106 year old from England they haven't been able to verify. Four all together.

World War II veterans are all over eighty and, while there are still millions left, I don't doubt there's fewer every day.

Korea. Viet Nam. Bosnia. Afghanistan. The problem is, there will always be new veterans. New men and women to stand outside grocery stores in Legion jackets and caps in early November.

New men and women to remember.

Since 2002, 133 Canadian soldiers have been killed serving in Afghanistan. The CBC maintains a list, here. And the overpasses are still filled from Trenton to Toronto, every time one of them comes home.


This link is to the video for John McDermott's Bringing Buddy Home.

The dysfunctional family of the Stewards of Gondor in The Lord of the Rings has interested me for a long time. This barely scratches the surface.

(The original song here is another that's fun to play with, having both internal rhymes and bits of assonance that make for almost rhymes.)

( A song for Faramir )

I went to Sam's Club and the Jewel to pick up supplies for dinner, as I'd requested Superburger as being really, really easy to chew. And fried potatoes. Also really, really easy to chew. But we were out of onions and low on potatoes, so first to Sam's for those. I would have picked up more ground beef there too, but they were out, so I'll grab some tomorrow so we can make meatloaf. (Chorus: Really, really easy to chew!)

I also picked up several birthday presents for Katie -- a selection of Curious George stories, three Dr. Seuss books in a bundle, and the classic Disney music DVD -- as we're at T-minus seven for her third birthday. Those all remain safely hidden in my trunk for the moment.

When I called daisy_knotwise to let her know that she'd need to thaw the remaining ground beef in the freezer as I'd struck out on fresh, I asked her if there was anything else she wanted from the Jewel other than buns and Julie formula.

"Yes," she replied. "I want something wonderful, but I don't know what."

So I promised I'd look. And on the way there, I realized what the correct wonderful thing would be. So when I walked into the Jewel, I started to head toward the bakery section, except the wonderful thing was sitting on the display right as I walked in.

Pumpkin pie. I picked it up and dropped it in the cart. I made sure to pick up more pressurized whipped cream, because I didn't want to run out in mid-pie, along with the other Superburger ingredients to replenish what we were about to use up, and the Julie formula.

When I got home, I announced to Gretchen that I had found the wonderful thing and produced the pumpkin pie. Not at all to my surprise, she concurred.

So later in the evening, we cut up the pie, giving a small piece to Katie, a fair sized piece to me, and a big piece to Gretchen, as I warned her that Julie would mug her for part of her pie.

Boy, did she! Eventually, she was grabbing the remains of the pie out of Gretchen's dish and chowing down on it. And Katie also requested more pie. So Gretchen got more pie and got Katie another small piece.

And there was much pie. And it was good.

And there is still one large piece left. :)