Dear Retarded People in My Office,

Spraying air freshener or perfume over a bad smell doesn't work. It just makes the air unbreathable. Perhaps try CLEANING instead.

Thanks,
Kelly

Whelp, 2010 seems like a big year for weddings. (Not that I'm objecting!)
However.. it finally happened where I was asked to do flowers for two separate weddings on the same date.

Wedding #1: Peacock theme down in Anaheim involving manzanita trees, feathers, submerged orchids and floating candles. Budget is around $1,500... possibly more depending.

Wedding #2: Down in La Jolla a garden theme with a much bigger budget.

La Jolla is AWESOME. And while it would be nice to play with more money etc, I've committed to wedding #1.

Another question: Why is August such a popular month to get married this year? I'm doing flowers for one Aug 7th, another for the 14th, and then one in 'late August' for duckierose

Looks like I'll have to get my seller's permit for flowers!

The heavily armed monkeys guarding the servers currently report no site-wide problems.

We can definitely see a lower tooth popping through Journey's gum. And she's hoisting herself to a standing position against the coffee table or crib. And she's crawling a few feet at a time.

AIE

At least she's sleeping through the night although the tooth cutting through causes her to wake and cry for a while each night. We callously ignore her pain and continue snoozing.

We watched Public Enemies last night. Michael Mann is a crappy director. Who the hell uses handheld camera work on a period movie set in the 1930s? What kind of stupid artistic decision is that? Oh yeah, a STUPID one.

It's been a momentous 12 months here at LiveJournal. We crossed a capital T at Ten years young. And, like most precocious pubescents, we celebrated turning double digits by publishing our first book! Needless to say, we've experienced some major changes, both inside and out. Before we recap, we'd like to thank you for bearing with us as we've struggled through ungainly growth spurts, identity pangs, and, yes, the occasional blemish. We hope you'll continue to stand by us: We're gaining wisdom with maturity.

Stuff you liked

• Back in February, we placed a call for entries for our ten-year anniversary anthology in lj_turns10. In December (less than a year later!), we officially announced the publication of Live Journal: The First Decade. Featuring an inspired collection of writing, photographs, and artwork from the pages of LiveJournal history, the book has been selected by Blurb.com as a top staff pick! We are proud to have played host to so much talent over the years, and we thank our contributors for sharing their extraordinary work.
• We all love quirky surprises, but not when it comes to managing our account settings. This year we streamlined settings into one central account management area. No more pouring through FAQs to figure out how to control privacy settings, modify notifications, adjust mobile settings, or update contact information!
• Being users ourselves, we realize our own mothers couldn't find us on LiveJournal based on our usernames and userpics alone (*heaves heavy sigh of relief*). But since there are times when we actually want to be found, we created a search tool--Find Your Friends--to help locate people by email address (it's in the Friends drop-down menu).
• Spam counter-attack: The war against vicious malware and spambots reigns eternal, but we've been making serious inroads to ensure your online security. We've established new protocols, such as requiring email address validations. We've grown more savvy about ferreting out suspicious behavior. We've added features, like whitelisting, to help you protect your communities. Our valiant (i.e., overworked) spam avengers (a/k/a the LiveJournal ops team) are standing on red alert so you can sleep safely at night.
• After an intensive beta, we launched My Guests at the end of the year, which lets you see who's been hanging around your journal. A number of you have even discovered secret admirers (not all of whom are creepy)!
• Last, but by no means least, we want to thank our volunteers for providing invaluable support and feedback. Their Herculean efforts enable us to answer your questions more efficiently, identify spammers, reduce abuse, and deliver better features (through tireless testing). On behalf of the staff and the larger LiveJournal community, we are truly grateful for their diligence, intelligence, loyalty, and passion.

You got your fix

• We recently debugged a number of the oustanding issues with the rich text editor so your entries look great regardless of whether you know html. You can read more about text editors here.
• In response to user demand, we brought back international voice posting. For more info on voice posting, read here.
• At long last, we revived TxtLJ with Verizon. For more info on TxtLJ, check out the FAQ.

Paid features you enjoyed

• In December, we introduced My Stats, which provides detailed data on who's been viewing your entries as well as statistics on commenting, RSS requests, friending history, and more. Despite a few early glitches, the response has been extremely favorable.
• This year, we launched and improved Notes (i.e., the feature formerly known as Alias), which lets you add private comments on friends and commenters (it's in the Profile drop-down menu). This way you won't be caught red-faced when you strain to remember details about that wonderful LiveJournal friend who sent you a birthday vGift. For more info, read the FAQ.
• When we first announced View friends pages by date, we thought it would be a quiet, minor enhancement. The rave reaction floored us, which made us all very happy. We gave it a fine tuning in February of 2009, so it's even better!
• How embarrassing! It appears pingbacks have gone back to the shop for service. We’ll keep you posted. We didn't know just much you liked pingbacks until it went in for service. It's back and, judging by your irritation when it wasn't available, this is good news. FYI, pingbacks send instant notifications (via screened comments) whenever someone links to one of your entries on LiveJournal. For more info, read this entry in paidmembers or check out the FAQ.

Mixed reviews

• The search is still on. Some of you have reported getting more comprehensive results for keyword searches using the new Yandex search engine and like the ability to search within content categories (like entries or comments). Others have not been satisfied with the relevancy of search results. Please be patient. We're still tweaking this product.
• This past December, we wanted to try out a new holiday promotion. Given the crap economy, we decided to offer our Paid/Permanent users a stack of $10 coupons to send to Basic/Plus users for paid account upgrades. We hoped you would like it. And some of you did, but many were disappointed that we didn't offer Give More as well. We want to thank you so much for letting us know. Your input will help us plan better in the future. Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users can continue to send out coupons through January 15th. Coupons can be redeemed through January 31, 2010.
• We were pretty excited about Your Journal Your Money, which allows Paid/Permanent users to earn extra cash by displaying Google ads to Basic/Plus and logged out users. A number of you tried it. Some of you really like it. Others, not so much. (Just FYI, Paid/Permanent users who do not participate in this program will not view ads on journals. Participants will see ads on their own journal, but won't see them on other journals unless they specifically opt in.) For additional details, visit here.
• We relaunched m.livejournal.com, our mobile app. While it offers a nicer UI and enhanced functionality, some of you think we can do better on load times. Like most of us, it's a work in progress. You can customize your mobile settings here. For more info, please read the FAQ.

Missing Inaction

• We shudder to bring up the neon purple elephant squatting on our heads, but, yes, we didn't give you those a la carte userpics. We've been making radical improvements to our backend in order to support them. But no excuses. We know you want them. We cringe every time you mention them. We're sorry we dropped the ball on this, and we promise to do our best to get them to you in 2010.

Stumbling points

• Back in early August, we experienced outages related to a series of DDoS attacks. We are proud to report that we were down a total of one hour over the course of a few days. We thank our heroic ops guys for getting us up sooner and more consistently than any of our less fortunate social networking friends. We apologize for leaving you temporarily stranded.
• A couple of months back, we offered a free, unrestricted vGift, which induced a snowflake cookie avalanche. This resulted in backed up/delayed notifications, which, in turn, led us to reboot systems, rendering scrapbooks unavailable. It took a while to shovel free. Apologies for the inconvenience. We learned a valuable lesson that should keep us calamity-free in the future (fingers crossed while knocking on wood).
• That darn Best Buy ad. First off, we're sorry about the audio auto-play (we got it turned off as quickly as possible). While it's true that we'll continue to show this type of ad to accounts that normally see them (never to Paid/Permanent accounts), we'll make sure the sound defaults to off moving forward. We promise to do our very best to keep ads to a minimum on LiveJournal, while keeping a roof over Frank's head.

Full steam ahead!

As we plunge headfirst into the next decade, we want to take a moment to look back and thank all of our employees, both past and present, who have worked so hard to create our unique and magical universe. We couldn't have made it this far without you: Your contributions brighten our path everyday. We also want to extend our heartfelt appreciation to each and every one of you. Whether you've been around for ten days or ten years, your humor, intelligence, talent, and creativity are what makes this the most vibrant global community on the Internet (the best place on the Web, in our humble opinion). Here's hoping that 2010 will be the greatest year yet! We thank you for joining us as we embark upon another glorious decade of LiveJournal history!

Tags: 10th anniversary, account settings, best buy, blurb, find friends, holiday promotion, international voice posting, my guests, paid accounts, rich text editor, spam, stats, txtlj, userpics, volunteers

Annoyingly, most of these have been pulled already, e.g. "House: every 'lupus' reference": This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by NBC Universal.

Fuck you, NBC Universal. How do you imagine that nuking this video helps your bottom line? "Gosh, I was going to watch House, but now that I've seen all the lupus references at once, I guess I won't bother."

Tags: mpegs, tv
Current Music: Little Boots -- Stuck on Repeat

Tags: mpegs, parts, perversions
Current Music: Cabaret Voltaire -- Automotivation

The heavily armed monkeys guarding the servers currently report no site-wide problems, however, some users may experience some slow load times while we test some performance tuning changes on our databases.

Engineers are three times more likely to become terrorists than those in finance, medicine, or science - in part, it has been suggested, because of “a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise.”

Tags: academia, engineering

I can kinda breathe through my nose! And I don't feel run over, just a little pummeled!

Yaaaaay! I feel OK
We will hope for good at a later date

Ever had one of those moments where you make what's supposed to be a conversational joke, but the person or people you're talking to just look at you blankly and then move on, and while they're moving on you think "Well, that was weird. Wait, what I just said could be misinterpreted in this way, and if he/she/they thought that… wow, that's awkward. Should I explain?" And by that time everyone's talking about something else, and it seems profoundly awkward to try to drag the conversation back a couple of minutes to say "Uh, when I said THIS, it was meant to be interpreted THIS way, you know, like *I* was the cow and the BIRDS had the whipped cream, see?" Especially since it's possible that they DIDN'T completely misinterpret you, they just didn't think what you said was particularly funny. And then you get to chose between being the person explaining a joke, which is always bad, and being the person that said That Awkward Thing that confused everyone.

I sometimes think that the difference between Geeks and Cool People has nothing to do with manners of dress, taste in entertainment, taped-up glasses and pocket protectors, computer aptitude, or anything else. It's just that Cool People either live in the present and never have these moments of self-doubt, or when they do, they casually know what to do, because, you know, they have advanced social skills instead of just basic ones.

Current Mood: geeky

Hysterical!!

It SNOWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWED!!!!

1-3 inches, just like the forecast predicted!!!!

Now my apartment should finally be a little bit warmer, provided the fluffy stuff doesn't blow off of the roof.

However, I'm still wondering why, with an actual blanket of snow on the road, the salt trucks are all driving around with the plows off the ground. Perhaps someone forgot to tell them the final important step.

Tags: snow

• 14:25 RT @rainnwilson: I bet Jar-Jar Binks was pissed he didn't get cast in Avatar. #

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Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go.

"In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are."

Tags: academia

The orchid hypothesis - that the genes we associate with negatives may also be strongly associated with positives (under the right circumstances):

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts.

This is one of those things I wish I'd heard about early enough to get it into the book. Print, she is so slow!

Tags: htdyoc

John Carpenter's The Thing is perhaps my favorite horror movie. (Re-Animator would be a serious contender if they'd deleted that scene. If you've seen it, you know which one I mean.)

I was delighted to find that Peter Watts had written a retelling from the alien's point of view.

Tags: fiction, movies

I hacked the ljdump Python script someone else wrote to make an untagged entries list exporter:

http://code.google.com/p/ljuntagged/downloads/list

I tested it on Livejournal and Dreamwidth, and it seems to work, so hooray.  It mmmay work on other LJesque sites, but I don't have accounts on those, so...

If you have input on this, feel free to provide input.  I'm very new to Python, so I'm sure I missed something.

Yay!

Researchers looked at 132 studies done over the course of 40 years, and came to the conclusion that women may have lower sex drives due to guilt.

Tags: catholicism, research

It took not remotely long at all to ramp up from "Welcome back from two weeks off!" to "We're all in high-speed panic mode!" On Monday, spreadnparanoia's brother started working with us as an intern, and he dropped by my desk to say hi, and ask if I had a busy day ahead.

And I said "No, we're just getting back, so things are pretty slow. Everyone else seems to be scrambling, but all I really have to do today is check this week's print proofs and edit tomorrow's web pieces. Oh, and sort through a couple dozen emails and assign pieces for an inventory. Oh, and write a couple of DVD briefs and a game piece. And send out an AVQA solicitation. Oh crap, and edit cinema for the week and pull it together. And, well, I have to sort through all this mail, and get the books in it sent out to reviewers. And, uh, get the next month of book review assignments worked out. And actually I'm working on this book-editing project right now…"

He said watching my face as that all sank in was pretty hilarious.

Still, I got through all of that (except the book project, which is ongoing, oh and actually I still have to write those DVD briefs and the game piece), and I figured out a simple way to organize the book stuff, so simple it makes me feel stupid because I should have started doing it this way more than a year ago. And Monday night I came home burned out and useless, but last night I was able to come home, work on the book, make a nutritious healthy dinner (wild rice soup with asparagus and kale) that broke down neatly into leftovers for the week, dissect a cantaloupe into a couple of days' worth of breakfast, plant an indoor winter herb garden, do the dishes, de-polish my nails, and get some basic cleaning in. If I could be this productive every day, I would have a lot more time to freely lounge around on the fainting couches, eating bonbons. Which I seem to be doing none of just now for some reason.

Instead, I'm eating a lot of fruit. I don't know what's going on, but here in the dead of winter in Chicago, the fruit is diverse and awesome just now. In the past week, I've had some amazing Chilean cherries, some of the best oranges I've ever eaten, and some really terrific kiwi fruit. I have pears waiting for me at home, and the cantaloupe was really good too. I know there are other places in the world that aren't as bitterly cold and everything-dead-y as Chicago right now, but with the outside world currently so inimical to life, it's sort of weird to be eating some of the best tropical fruit ever. Not that I'm complaining, om nom nom nom.

Oh, and speaking of om nom nom, I only recently realized that it came from Cookie Monster, and that's why it became so instantly universal — half of us grew up watching him nom things. Here he is talking about it in a surprisingly erudite and philosophical recent interview:

Current Mood: chipper

They just announced! And he is IN!

http://community.baseballhall.org/Page.aspx?pid=569

I heard something rustling around again last night and went to investigate.

I followed the noise to a white plastic bag that, among other things, contained some treats for my parrot, so The Thing was apparently having dinner. I snatched up the bag, but the creature was quick and I saw a dark shape dart out of the bag and behind a board that was propped against the wall. I pulled the board away, and there was no mere mouse behind it, but a giant fucking RAT. It dove under my work table, into a wadded-up plastic tarp. I stood there with my jaw dropped for a moment, and then decided that I didn't really feel like dealing with a giant fucking RAT at 3am, so I went back to bed. I left the light on in hopes that it would frighten it into remaining in the tarp while I got some sleep, but NOOOOOooooo, it kept me up ALL night, scratching at things and running around. I gathered together a pile of cheap Home Depot paint brushes, and used them as projectiles every time I saw it run out across the floor, which did nothing to alleviate the situation, but it was somewhat cathartic.

I think it's only been in my place for the past couple days, but I'm wondering how the hell it got in? I have something of a hell-mouth in my back laboratory slop-sink room, and while I typically keep the door to that room closed, I did leave it open when I ran upstairs to throw some laundry in the drier on Sunday night, so maybe it ran in then. Who knows.

I called my building management and they're sending Pest Control over to deal with the situation. Let's hope this little unpleasantness will be over by the time I return home this evening.

...the space where one gathers their bags and puts on their shoes after going through security is labeled "Recombobulation Area".

Tags: via ljapp

• 17:29 it's a mistake to send me a package wrapped in bubble wrap, I'm enjoying it more than the American Idol TV tray it came with. #

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