I'm at the AT&T store, changing our phone plans over to my name so we can have the 24% discount offered by my lovely employer! I'm all about the sparklies, here.

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and some days you lose.

This is Bryan's ingenious idea for waking Ganon up in the morning. He turns on our light, puts Ganon in our room, then turns on Bob the Builder. It has never failed. :D

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There's a story here I need to tell.. I just need to find it.

Ganon: *runs into the kitchen & exclaims urgently* I DON'T KNOW!
Me: *also urgent* You don't KNOW?!
Ganon: NO! I DON'T!
Me: WHAT ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?!
Ganon: *stops, gapes at me* I...don't know.
Ganon: *blinks, walks out of kitchen*

Album of pictures I edited using CameraBag on my iPhone.

Posted via web from Wondering If You'd Come Along

i wrote this then drew this then decided i won't use it for gunshow, so here it is everyone



I'm gonna be at dwex this weekend!! WILL YOU BE THERE??

Please note our nicknames on the board. :D O night shift, how I love thee!

Posted via email from Just Wondering If You'd Come Along

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. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
3. 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)!
4. 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
5. 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!

A couple of conversations this morning revealed to me that I know absolutely nothing about the process of getting a tattoo. Will those of you who have tattoos please share stories with me? First tattoo, best or worst experience, what to wear, how long it took for a tattoo of how many colors or what size, whether yours was broken down into different sessions, etc. Anything you think that a total tattoo virgin should know.

Pertinent info: I plan on getting a compass ross on my back, centered approximately between my shoulderblades. It will be the size of my palm and circled by the words "I ain't waiting for the world to change; gonna change the world for you..." I'm going to talk it over with the tattoo artist & decide on what colors would work best on my skin, how many colors, etc. I have the pain tolerance of a slab of granite and no fear of needles, but I do not know what a tattoo needle is like.

Thanks for the help!

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.

I did a whole buncha turkey comics last november, and since it is november again, I think I will post them cus there aint anywhere else for them since they got lost when my LJ got hacked/slashed/deleted for a bit/etc.

( there are better ones under here, I promise. also some videoes )

Ganon has a room in my parents' house. They decided he needed his own Christmas tree.

Posted via email from Just Wondering If You'd Come Along

With no open flame for maximum toddler safety! Woohoo!

Posted via email from Just Wondering If You'd Come Along

Yesterday Q & I had conversations about everything on the way home. One conversation led to wondering how old Rashawn Ross (cuddly, adorable trumpet player for DMB) is, and that led to a Wikipedia lookup, which led to the discovery that Rashawn Ross was born in 1979: only 2 months older than me, 7 months older than Q. It's always weird to discover that someone you consider to be MASSIVELY, incredibly, mind-blowingly talented is your own age.

This led to a convo about mind-blowing talent; I am not starstruck by people who are just "famous", but I think that if I met someone like Rashawn Ross or Jeff Coffin or someone else who's sheer incredible talent I admire, I'd be a jibbering, stuttering, blushing wreck. It isn't because they're famous; after all, if you had never seen my Jeff Coffin icons, would you know him if you ran into him at the grocery store? He's not famous that way. But for me, running into someone like that at the grocery store, knowing what they do, listening to their music, feeling completely humbled by their talent, and there they are buying milk or mac & cheese or apples or cheetos...I'd probably go to pieces.

This led to another point in the conversation: I want, with all my heart and all the way into my bones, to be That Good at something. And offhandedly I remarked to Q that I'd just never found the thing I felt I could be that good at (or had the specific motivation to), and she pointed out that yes, I have. It's nursing, and specifically trauma nursing. She's right; I want to be known for being that person who stands in the treatment room, waiting for the stretchers to pour in after the multi-vehicle pileup, a rock of calm & not a trace of panic. I want to be that person who wades into dangerous situations and snatches other people out. I want people to remember their close calls and say "If it hadn't been for that redheaded nurse..."

Of course that's never going to make someone go into a pile of jibbering, blushing stutters at me in the grocery store, but I don't really care about that part. No, this is for ME. If I'm that good at trauma nursing, if I'm That Nurse, then maybe I wouldn't feel like I'd go to pieces if I met someone with that kind of talent. I want to be able to say "Yes, he's one of the greatest sax players in the world, and I am one of the best trauma nurses in the world."

If only I could learn faster! Get more experience quicker! This is the part where Q said "There you go again, eating the world with your eyes." Ha. Yes, well, I suppose Ganon got it somewhere, right? I've been at it for 3 months and I know I've learned a thousand things in that time--things that will make me a better nurse. Oh, but how I long for it to go faster! How I want to learn enough to feel relatively confident, and then go into the ER and then get into a trauma center and LIVE this thing that I have in my head! All the little things like work-related lacerations and broken bones all the way up to multiple trauma from a MVA or burns from a house fire. I want that NOW and I know I'm not ready for it yet. I just don't have the background. Why can't I get the background FASTER?!

But at least I'm progressing. I can see it. I'm in arrhythmia recognition now, and then I can take advanced cardiac life support. That's as far as they'll pay for me to go where I am currently, but then someday when I'm in ER, they will send me to advanced trauma life support and sexual assault nursing.

But I still need to get my tattoo, my compass that reminds me that this is a journey & not a destination. This is not someplace I'm going, this is something I'm doing. I need to stop being so impatient, so frantic to get on with it.

This has been another stream-of-consciousness life realization brought to you by the letter Q. Certainly one of my favorite letters. ^_~

Edit: It took me a while to decide to post this unlocked. This is a lot more in-depth about myself than I usually go, and when I do I usually lock. Sometimes I think if we were all more open about the ways in which we struggle--the things that really capture our minds & mean something to us--that we'd all be a little more understanding. So here's my contribution to the general understanding of humanity. What it's like to want something so badly it feels like a fire in your head.

Sorry for the delay.. I got caught up reading the gathering storm.

Posted via email from Just Wondering If You'd Come Along

Posted via email from Just Wondering If You'd Come Along

Posted via email from Just Wondering If You'd Come Along