Friends

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!

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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.

Bonfire night was.. alright. We (Dan, Michelle, Michelle's boyfriend and I) went to a bonfire/fireworks show in Wimbledon Park. You had to pay £7 to get in and although there were a couple of other shows elsewhere that were free, this was the only one that definitely had a bonfire.
Turned out it was not worth the £7 as you couldn't get anywhere close to the bonfires, they were small and not impressive at all, and the fireworks show was completely random and very unprofessionally done. Seriously, never again will I complain about fireworks shows back home.
I had a toffee apple and Michelle had candy floss, and then we stood around a bit watching the fair before getting tired of standing around and went back home. Dan and I proceeded to have a few drinks and lengthy talks about love and relationships in the kitchen - Michelle and Micki were going to join us but I guess they got distracted, because they stayed in Michelle's room for the rest of the night. Dan managed to get really drunk from just a couple of ciders so he went to bed early, and that was that.

I had planned on going swimming earlier that day, but chickened out. I then planned to go swimming yesterday, but Dan didn't feel like coming with me and I wasn't feeling brave enough to go on my own. So instead I went to town and spent some money, buying a reading lamp, some underwear and a new belt, a couple of sewing things, make-up and booze.
In the evening, Dan and I went to the gay bar. I seriously love it there, more and more every time we go. As it's only a five minutes walk, if that, I decided not to wear a jacket and only wore a tank top and a small scarf (because it was freezing out and my throat has been bothering me for way too long already). Of course, the minute we stepped outside, it started raining. And by raining, I mean pouring. We were drenched to the bone when we got to Escape - but at least the lovely guy that (I think) runs the place felt sorry for us enough to let us go in for free, as we arrived at ten o'clock exactly, and that's when they start charging.
There were a lot of people from the LGBT society there, as well as people we'd talked to before in the bar, so at least half of the people there were familiar faces - one of the reasons I love it there so much. As usual, Dan got more attention than he even realised.. I think he made out with at least three guys that night. We've been there about four times together and he always ends up getting intimate with someone, which is a little funny, and a little frustrating for me. I'd said before we went out that if I didn't get a snog there, I would cry. But I did, so no crying. Yay!
We were there till closing time, dancing almost the whole time - five hours! We took short breaks for drinks and bathroom, but they were always very short breaks. I can't believe I lasted that long - needless to say, my feet were dying afterward, but it was so very worth it. Maybe dancing sobers me up? In any case, I spent almost £30 on shots and drinks at the bar, as well as having a few drinks at home beforehand, and all I felt was a tiny bit dizzy by the end of the night. As soon as we got outside though, my head was strangely clear, and walking was not a problem. Strange.
I woke up this morning just before ten, after only five hours of sleep. I dozed for about an hour, but then I woke up and could not get to sleep again, no matter how I tried. I don't know what that's all about, but hopefully it means I'll be able to fall asleep fairly early tonight? Tomorrow sounds like it's going to be busy at uni.

Ehh, I feel weird that I have nothing more news worthy than my nights out. I really do need to get some work done, especially as I have a tutorial coming up with my tutor, and I've not really done anything. I showed some pictures from the geek project in last week's seminar though, and I got some valuable feedback. Sadly, I don't think I'll be using the pictures I took at home this summer in the final project as I'm not happy with the quality of them - this is completely my fault and I'm very sad, because everyone who showed up delivered awesome pictures. :( But I'm going to experiment with this a little bit more and see if I can come to a conclusion I like.

Am possibly going to Brighton next weekend and see Lauren (who I haven't seen in almost a whole year!) and on Sunday Dan and I are going to see Patrick Wolf in London! So excited! :D

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!
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Today, I stuffed a towel in my bag, bought a cheap swimsuit in town and walked through Bushy Park toward a swimming pool. I took the decision to do this yesterday, but I didn't tell anyone about it because it happens too often that when I talk about my plans for anything with anyone, I end up not going through with them.
So even if I really would have liked to have someone with me, I kept silent and walked there on my own.

Walking, in retrospect, was possibly not the best idea. It was at least half an hour's walk, which gave me plenty of time to get really nervous. On the way there I also remembered I had forgotten to look for swimming goggles with prescription, so that I could actually see anything.

I'm still not sure whether being able to see anything clearly would make it better or worse for me. This time, I couldn't see anything and for the first lap, that was okay because when my face went underwater, I closed my eyes, so I wasn't actually looking at what was underwater. And that helped in distracting me enough.
I was almost halfway through my second lap when I did open my eyes underwater, saw some shadows on the bottom of the pool and freaked out completely. Hurried out of the pool and spent a couple of minutes in the private changing stalls crying and shaking.
Somehow, I actually managed to not panic on my way home. I had to walk a fair bit to the bus stop, wait for the bus for almost 20 minutes, then change buses in Kingston... it took me a good while. And though I was close to tears the whole way, I somehow managed to hold back until I got to my room.

So yeah. Did not go very well. But I don't think I should've been expecting it to go well, really. Dan says he'll come with me next time, so hopefully that will help. Worst case scenario, at least I'll have someone to calm me down afterward.