Friends

I saw the trailer for Avatar in IMAX3D today, it looked like total awesomeness.... little did I know it was inspired by true events, check it out...

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/251890

The episode is only up until wedneday so watch as soon as you can.

Last night consisted of ALOT of this.



Have 15 of 27 ornaments drawn and waiting for paint/reinking.

Really need to start responding to emails/comments on DA. Will probably do tonight.

• 09:52 Watching Jamie Oliver this morning makes me want to call everyone "darling" and describe things as "lovely" ...even if they aren't. #
• 09:54 With the holidays approaching, I really want to roast a chicken. Specifically with lemon and sage. Need a better roasting pan first. #
• 19:15 I just realized that I don't know what my college mascot was. Or if we even had one. What would a mascot for the Flying Dutchmen even be? #
• 19:23 A little internet searching informs me that they got a mascot in 2006, after I left. It is a Dutch man. You know how I feel about the Dutch. #
• 22:20 Sitting at home trying to nurse myself back to health. Can't figure out why my iPod won't let me find Parliament alphabetically. Bed soon. #
• 22:21 Worst part of being sick? The dramatic temperature changes going on internally. Sweating then freezing then burning up again... Ugh! #

Day 6 – 9/18



There wasn’t much time for breakfast before Jer and I went down to Waterloo station, caught a southern train to Godalming, and taxi’d our way to the Mackenzie residence to meet Ronnie’s fiancé, Stuart, and his family. They served tea, deliciously small sandwich slices, sausages, puffy cheese-it-like pastries, an unidentified meat-filled pastry, and other refreshments. They rented a keyboard for the wedding, and Jer tried it out while I talked with Ronnie’s soon-to-be father-in-law and was given a tour of the backyard, a narrow but deep piece of land and a gorgeous garden.

The wedding ceremony was to be hald at the registry office in Godalming. The party was small, around 20 or so people, and it was officiated by the most proper and polite women I’ve yet to meet. Apparently the lyrics to the song I was to sing had to be checked, since the ceremony was strictly secular, but they passed the test and were considered lovely. The songs we were asked to perform had to be cut time-wise due to the brevity of the ceremony, which was a discouraging last minute change, but who were we to argue with the bride? We were introduced to friends and relatives of the groom and had to hide Stu, who was terrified of seeing Ronnie in her dress before the ceremony. Everyone was in good humor, and the closer the clock ticked towards the ceremony, the more comfortable I became.

I only sang one song, The Luckiest, during the signing of the registry. Jer played Tifa’s Theme for the presenting of the bride, and The Prologue for the exiting procession.

Ronnie, insistent on not being “one of those women” who cry the whole time, did not quite make it as she entered. If I had to sing for ten more seconds, I don’t know if I would have either. Jer almost forgot he was playing for the ceremony while watching Ronnie’s entrance.



After bubble blowing and pictures, we went back to the Mackenzie household for more pictures, mingling, and jamming. We met Ronnie’s good friend Rachel, Caroline, a friend named Tim who interned for the BBC, Stuart’s best friend Andy, and resident DM Alex. We made our way to Pezzo, a posh but unpretentious Italian restaurant (Mozzarella in Carrozza does sound better than its English equivalent), and after a dinner of Penne my desert was a giant scoop of ice cream covered in crushed hazelnuts, like a fist-sized Ferrero Rocher.

Ronnie and Stuart had a cottage to themselves, where Jer and I would be staying the night with Rachel, while the newlyweds were driven off to their own accommodations. Andy came with us, and we went to the local bar, Wetherspoon’s, leaving Jer behind but who followed later. The crowd was becoming a bit too thick, so we abandoned it in favor of a church graveyard and strongbow cider, wandering to the Jack Philips Memorial and around the park, talking to the sky as much as to each other, though by swaggering could I never thrive.



We returned to the cottage until Andy made his leave and I passed out on the couch while Jer talked with Adrienne via WoW, after absent-mindedly watching whatever was on at whatever time it was.

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!

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )

Day 5 – 9/17

Day five was another solo journey, which started at the 24 hour food stand on our block. I wish there was a place in walking distance here where I could get samosas whenever I want (there’s a restaurant further north, however, and it has been taken most advantage of).

I had been given mixed reviews to whether I should make the British Museum a priority for the trip, but in the end my decision to go was based on how much regret I think I would have if I didn’t. How could I, an honest tourist, pass it up?



There were a few exhibits of limited duration, including a Japanese Dogu display that was only running from September through November of this year. It focused on clay figurines from the Jomon period (14,000 B.C. – 400 B.C., or B.C.E. for the PC folks), most from about 2,500 – 1,000 B.C.), and the majority have never been on display outside their country of origin. Most of the text for the exhibit was mere speculation, and all the world seems to know about them is that they’re the oldest found forms of pottery manufacture on earth. Hm. I guess the power of the ancients and their secrets will only remain in the past.

There were a few other remarkable exhibits – 7,000 years of Chinese jade, an incredible clockwork display (I’m a sucker for the miniatures), thousands of incredibly preserved porcelain works, and an interesting room on the history of money.



They sold bottled mango lassi in the lobby!

I dropped by Buckingham Palace again, hoping to catch the Royal Guards this time after the Tuesday rains, and there they were behind the gates. Perhaps they had enough of pesky foreigners and no longer posted in front of the entrance?

Next: the Tower of London. The beefeater tour was worth waiting to hear, especially since my remembrance of history at the tower was fed mostly by fiction and film. A Yeoman warder conversed with our waiting group, expressing his disdain for tourists yet managed to offend noone, and I met a family from Wheaton (?!). I wish more attention was given to the building where Newton lived, but I was content with the White Tower, Bloody Tower, Traitor’s Gate, and other such Capitalized Places. All of us had to stand on a conveyor belt which whisked us past the Crown Jewels, which in hindsight was a genius idea since who knows how backed up the building would become as onlookers stared forever. The ravens seemed happy with their lot. There was also an exhibit on Henry the VIII, entitled “Dressed to Kill.”



After returning to the hostel, Jer and I practically ran to Wigmore Hall to make it in time for a concert being put on by the Ysaye Quartet. They were recommended by a couple friends, and it was worth the run. They bowed and bowed.



We returned to the hostel in our suits, and as we were walking towards our room a small group was leaving. One of the girl commented to us, “Oh, all business!” We joined them with their friends at the bar, all four from Bremen, Germany, until the bar closed.

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.

... don't like most of them. Too busy crying if anything doesn't go their way.

• 12:10 *giggle* My company was featured on Colbert Report last night. We're in the Better Know a District segment. The ugly 70's facade is us. #
• 18:45 Words of wisdom for this Tues evening: 'If mom calls, tell her I'm shitting... Son, marriage is about not having to lie about taking a shit" #

• 17:20 I am not a huge Guy Fieri fan, but I really want to make this recipe: bit.ly/2aJOk5 #

• 09:47 Camping site is booked for next year. SO excited. Only 9 months to go! #

Even though it seems like my life is submerged in it, I miss cosplay. And by this I mean, I MISS cosplaying. The majority of this year has been spent making costumes for others. Which, don't get me wrong, has been an amazing and great experience that I definitely want to continue to do.

I really miss making elaborate costumes for myself. My last "elaborate" costume was Lady from DMC4. That's coming up on almost 2 years ago. All other costumes of mine have been small and simple, no great detail involved.

Starting with Ohayocon and definitely following for Acen, I want to make something BIG for myself. I miss being in cosplay groups. I miss having photographers ask me for mini photo shoots at the con (yes I'm vain). I miss all the time working on that complicated costume. I miss the feeling you get when you leave your hotel room for the first time in that costume...crazy excitement!

Since I won't be strapped to an Artist's Alley table at Ohayocon, I'm very much looking forward to the con. I guess its time to flip through my "possible costumes" folder on my desktop. =P

Current Mood: nostalgic

We all have the freedom to choose. But we also must realize that every choice has a consequence, good and bad.

I'm trying to let this sink in further in my head. Especially for some upcoming choices that will be very difficult to make, and some that will be life changing.

• 10:30 I just want to put on a flannel and a pair of jeans and grab my Uggs....and maybe hit the apple orchard. Is that so much to ask? #

The empire strikes back

RSS feeds again

xkcd_rss

icanhaschzbrgr

Wii have killer CSI Deadly Intent contests!

c_s_i

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Enveloped in postcards

Photos of the week

lj_photophile

• 08:00 When making your own chili sambal it is both wise and prudent to avoid the fumes during the boiling process. They make your eyes burn. #
• 08:28 Happy Anniversary, Sesame Street! #
• 09:26 Eve's Addiction wants me to buy the Tiffany-inspired wishbone necklace. I inexplicably want to say yes...but alas, I will not. #
• 11:20 Just got hit on outside the mall by a man who was 'watching me in the mall'...both flattering and slightly creepy. #
• 14:56 Our sales consultants seriously need to be fired. They are so rude its a wonder we have ANY customers. #
• 16:00 twitpic.com/oa1nx My anniversary flowers came a week early, but aren't they soooo pretty? #

On my recent "first seasons of shows I haven't seen" viewing schedule, I am currently on Breaking Bad. If you've never watched it, give it a try. It's well written and acted (I never even realized it was Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle in the main role until I heard about him winning this year's Emmy).

One thing I didn't expect is the humor. It's rare, but occasionally there will be something really funny in the show, sometimes dark comedy, sometimes not.

• 16:17 Awesome. The eye twitch is back and there will be no bonus again this quarter. "But at least I still have a job..." #

• 12:53 The month of October has zapped my enthusiasm for working. #