I woke up this morning and my bedroom was glowing white light, the sun reflecting off the snow piled up on the big fur tree that rubs up against my bedroom window. I still make myself blind in the winter here because I don't know how to wear sunglasses in December. And I wonder if there is something in the genes that allows you to walk on ice, or not. Midwesterners know how to do it, and Coloradans (who are midwestern, western, Californian which is something else) know. I wear solid boots but I walk around like I'm high-heel hobbled. Crossing the bridge to campus this morning, and elderly man actually stepped aside so that I could hold onto the rail as we passed. Shame. As I walk to the downtown campus from my bus stop, there's this surreal view of amazing, huge, snow-capped, blue-edged mountain ranges in the far distance, and in the mid-distance there's Invesco Field, which (google a picture to understand) has this weird wavy construction -- I think maybe to mirror the mountains -- which makes it look like it's about to topple. And near that the Elitch Gardens ferris wheel. I'm surprised by this every day.

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.

I have been in an anxious, unproductive mood for the past week or so, and I spent most of the weekend worrying. Finally this afternoon I made myself leave my apartment and walk in the snow for a while, and then I took the bus to Target (actually, it's two buses), and that's where I finally got the holiday spirit.



You don't have to shame me; I am already ashamed. But shopping in stores full of ridiculous, cheap holiday crap is part of my heritage. And Target in general is just an embarrassing comfort for me. You can buy anything there. And it is very brightly-lit, and the red everywhere. (I also really like those 24-hour Walgreen's, and the commercials for them, where the whole neighborhood is pitch-black except for the gold-glowing Walgreens with its emergency ice cream and heating pads.) And unlike many people who go to Target, I am totally there for pleasure. Not because I am out of toothpaste. Even when I buy toothpaste, it is in the spirit of pleasure. I look at all the toothpastes very carefully, and think about the strangeness of having all these toothpastes to choose from. Do I want extra-whitening? Do I need more tartar protection? I never thought about it before! Hmm. And this is why everyone hates to go to Target with me, but that's fine. Like going to the movies, Target shopping is an experience best enjoyed alone.

I took the first bus halfway home, then realized I'd have to wait almost 40 minutes for the second one, and it was only two miles more, so I decided to walk. A little bit of an adventure after dark in the snow - most of the sidwalks haven't been shoveled, and the ones that have are packed ice. At one point I got immersed in an interview with Carrie Fisher that I was listening to, and I slipped on black ice; my left leg began to bend in the wrong direction, and now my knee and thigh are still a little throbby, but it is the earned throb of an American consumer on the ides of November. Most of the houses I passed on the way home had their fire places going, and like it almost always does, the smoke smell reminded me of when our house burnt when I was six, just a few days after Christmas, and the house was destroyed but my parents tried to clean up a lot of our toys and books, and they did such a good job that most of the stuff did not look smoke-damaged, but it smelled, oh it smelled; for the longest time, when people mentioned "old book smell," I thought that was the smell they meant. One of the toys I got that year was a ventriloquist's dummy, but I never really learned how to throw my voice. I only practiced it in bed at night when I was trying to fall asleep - I had awful insomnia when I was a kid. But of course it's hard to tell if you're successfully throwing your voice in the dark.

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!

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.

Watching last night's Mad Men...


Sterling: How long you think it'll take us to be in a place like this again?
Draper: I never saw myself working in a place like this.

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.