Entries tagged with lj

Entry tags:

testing 1 2 3...

LJ is swallowing my longer posts again. I wonder if this will get through.

And http://status.livejournal.com times out. Lovely.

Site performance was mostly fine for the first almost-six years of my journal's existence. Why has it started to suck so badly this month?

Entry tags:

posting still broken

I can post only short entries. Sometimes I can make short edits. Ignore the partial "parsha bit" post (failed edit); will delete/retry later.

Entry tags:

ping

*tap* *tap*

Is this thing on?

Edit: I've tried several times to post a shortish (two-paragraph) entry. The web interface returns a blank page and the email bounces. I've seen the status message, and I've seen that some of you aren't having this problem. Oh well; I guess I'll be back after Shabbat, if LJ cooperates. (If this edit works, that'll give me one more thing to try...)

Entry tags:

fluff,
lj

behind on LJ (and a little fluff)

What with the DSL outage, I'm rather behind on LJ. I might or might not be able to catch up over the next couple days. If there's anything you think I should see/know (since Wednesday) that I haven't yet commented on, please point it out. Thanks.

In an attempt to provide some non-DSL content:

Me: I saw an arrogant license plate yesterday: GODSENT.
Dani: Maybe it was meant to be parsed differently.
Me: Divinely-owned foliage of unusual size would require a space.
Dani: Maybe they want it to be ambiguous.
Me: Anyone who considers that ambiguous is not in their target audience.

:-)

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interviewed by kitanzi

The interview meme is making the rounds again.

kitanzi asked me some questions:

( Read more... )

Here's the rules:

Leave me a comment saying "interview me".
I will respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better.
You will update your LJ with the answers to the questions.
You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the post.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

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birthday wishes

Happy birthday

hakamadare! (I usually don't manage to
remember birthday greetings, so all you folks I've missed shouldn't take
it personally.)

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fruitcake

If you don't think that the words "yummy" and "fruitcake" belong in the same sentence, then you have never had fruitcake made by

browngirl. Mmmm! I will be savoring this gift over several days. :-)

Entry tags:

a different S2 style question

I found the list of which styles support which features, where features of interest include showing user pics, changing font sizes, and (not explicitly on the list) seeing comments as threads rather than "flat". So far the least-bad alternative seems to be Punquin Elegant, which is what I'm currently using.

That's a two-column format, where the second column contains the default user pic and the links to user info, friends, and calendar. Some other styles put that at the top of the page, which is a much better use of space -- why should I give up 20% of the width all the way down to support a little blob of info at the top? A similar style, Flexible Squares, lets you get rid of that column, but it had some other major problem that I now can't remember. (Maybe that was the one where the lock icons on protected entries were too hard to see.)

The current style shows entry-specific user pics for each entry. Actually, all I want is for the assigned pic -- not the journal default -- to be shown when I click through to an individual entry. But it seems to be a package deal.

If I could take Punquin Elegant, move the links to the top of the page (like with Magazine -- which doesn't support changing fonts), and get rid of the second column entirely, I'd have everything I need. I didn't realize that wanting both a text-centric layout (no space-wasting frills) and user pics on individual entries was so unusual. Oh well. I don't think I'm ready to climb the S2 learning curve just now.

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LJ customization question

I've never delved into S2 customization, but I know some of you have so I'm hoping one of you can throw me a few hints.

I'm using Generator, which I mostly like (it has the useful property of protecting my reading page from wide entries), but on pages for individual entries (mine or others'), it shows the default userpic instead of the one for that particular entry. How do I fix that? Until recently I was just using the LJ default style for viewing individual entries (which gets this right), rather than trying to impose my style, but the white background is kind of harsh and I see no way to just change the colors on the LJ default. So instead I have to impose an entire style. Fooey.

Entry tags:

lj,
navel-gazing

why keep a public journal?

Yesterday

goldsquare asked: Why blog? Why write this way, why write the things you do, why do it here? What does it do for you, what about you makes you wish to do it? and got some interesting responses. This is something I think about, and am curious about, too. Here's what I posted there about why I keep a journal. (I meant to post this here last night but didn't get to it. So while I'm avoiding a tedious, unnecessary meeting, I'll post it now. :-) )

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

short takes

"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system." (Seen here and passed on by

sui66iy.)

That poll I posted on Friday got 15 responses in the first 20 minutes, three of them from people who don't openly subscribe to my journal. *boggle*

SCA: Woo hoo! A local clue-enabled couple won Crown Tourney yesterday. Nice folks; I'm really happy for them. The next 11 months should be lots of fun. (As ariannawyn pointed out, this might be the first queen who's won one of Yama Kaminari's fundoshi oil-wrestling contests, which, yes, is as strange as it sounds.)

Quoth some recent spam: "your woman wants a replica". Really? I have a woman? Please give her two messages, then: (1) she's late with her share of the mortgage, and (2) she can buy her own damn replica.

Around 6:00 tonight I got a phone solicitation from someone claiming to be calling from Jerusalem. So that would have been, what, 1:00 AM? That seems like a lot of effort to catch people at dinner time -- and that's just eastern time. (Though I'm told that Californians eat late compared to midwesterners, so maybe they just call them first thing in the caller's morning.)

Trope geekery: the torah portion I'm currently learning (fourth aliya of Bamidbar) has four munachs in a row (followed by pazeir, which itself is pretty unusual). I occasionally see two munachs in a row; I think I've seen three. Four? Weird. I had to look up what to do with that. (Munach is one of those symbols that has different melodies depending on local context.)

For the bar mitzvah I'm conducting in July, I've decided to read rather than chant the portion up to where the student takes over. I figure that this way I won't be upstaging the kid; while in many congregations it wouldn't be perceived that way, I'm not sure about ours and that family is already having to deal with deviation from the norm because they won't get a rabbi. I asked my rabbi if this seemed appropriate to him (and explained my reasoning) and he concurred. Reading without chanting is going to take some getting used to, though!

Hebrew class tomorrow night. I'm considering asking the teacher to move me to the next section for the ulpan (that is, one ahead of where the group I'm now with will be going). It's possible that this will also get me a different teacher, which is not a change I'd frown on. But mainly, I figure that if it's too advanced we can fix it on the first night, but if the class is too basic I'll never be able to jump up.

Entry tags:

lj,
memes

TrustFlow (networking meme)

Interesting. I tried out "TrustFlow", which assesses your "friends" list and their lists and so on and nominates people who are popular among your friends but not directly your friends. Their model is that friend = trusted party (not a safe bet with LJ, but what can you do?), and each person distributes "trust points" evenly among his friends, and after you run this a few levels out you start to get a picture. (Algorithm description.) (I found out about this from

dragontdc.)

I recognize many of the names on my list, which isn't surprising. What is surprising is that I don't recognize the top scorer and we have only one friend in common. I'm curious about that.

Here are the results (with their canned text): ( Read more... )

Created by ciphergoth; hosted by LShift.

TrustFlow II: Who is closest to your friends list?

Entry tags:

short takes

LJ is still dropping more comment email than it's delivering, at least to me. If I haven't responded to something you expected me to reply to, that's probably why.

This week I have been blessed with food gifts. First lorimelton and ralphmelton gave me yummy ginger-chocolate bars (and is that crystalized ginger mixed into the batter too?), and then today's mail brought a lovely fruitcake from browngirl. It's beautiful and smells wonderful, and I look forward to savoring it in small doses.

Scott Adams' entry on bluffing literacy could explain some people I've known. :-)

Someone gave me this at Darkover. I've always wanted one! ( image behind here )

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LJ: tags

Tags: so close and yet so far. Sigh.

I really like being able to tag journal entries. This should, in principle, make it much easier to find specific entries in the future -- the "gee, I know I posted about $SUBJECT sometime last year" factor. Yes, I know tags can be used two ways, for retrieval and for entry synopsis; I care deeply about the former and not at all about the latter. If my subject lines, opening paragraphs, and cut-tag text fail to give you an idea reasonably quickly about what the entry is about, I have likely failed as a writer.

Ok, so retrieval is critical. LJ documentation says that you can only retrieve the 100 most recent entries with a given tag, which sounds like a lot but isn't if you've had your journal a while. Worse, it was only some time later, after I'd tagged a bunch of entries, that I discovered that the limit is really 70 (or 75?), not 100. At least in my journal's style. I think this is probably a bug in the style and I did report it a while back; as I recall, it disappeared into the land of "we'll investigate". But that was at least thee months ago, so maybe they really consider it a featue.

This limitation might be fine if you could query tags using boolean expressions. It would let me have fairly general buckets while still being able to find, say, my entries about SCA cooking ("sca" and "food"). Boolean expressions have been requested, but I don't think they're working on it.

So, erratically, I've been refactoring some of my tags that turned out to be too general. While a few of these were in the "what was I thinking?" category, like my "judaism" tag, some are ones I fully expected to stay under 100 when I created them. And they did -- but they went over 75. Or they're in danger of doing so.

There will come a point in the future when the limits on entries will make tags useless. I've had this journal for over four years and wouldn't be surprised if I still have it four years from now, after all. Eventually they're going to have to either boost the limit or implement boolean expressions. (And maybe hierarchical tags.)

So please excuse the taggy clutter in my journal; this is a gradual process. (And I've got a lot of untagged entries, too.) If you notice suboptimal tags on my entries, particularly older ones, feel free to drop me email or a comment about it.

Entry tags:

lj,
memes

in lieu of content...

I got this from

browngirl and others.

If you are so inclined, take a look at my icons and comment with the following:
1. One that makes you automatically think of me.
2. One that you think I should use more often.
3. One that you don't get/needs more explanation/you have no idea why the hell I have it.
Comment using an icon of yours that you LOVE, and tell me why you picked THAT one too.

Entry tags:

lj,
memes

mind map

My, what a pretty visualization. I wonder what all the symbol encodings mean. Size seems to be tied to number of connections and color to clusters (people who are mostly friends with each other). I don't know what the brackets and position mean.

( Click here to see! )

Edit: Hey, I just noticed that some of my mutual friends aren't here. I wonder what's up with that, given that some who are very loosely connected (clique size 1) do show up.

Entry tags:

test (2)

This is a test of posting by email. It is only a test. Had this been an actual post, there would have been content. Or at least I like to think so. :-)

(Hmm. Sometime before I leave I should see about enabling phone posts.)

Entry tags:

lj,
people

random geek notes

Someone at MIT is doing what looks to be an interesting blog survey. It appears that, even though they ask people to spread the news via their blogs, they didn't anticipate the resulting demand on the server. So it may take a few tries to get the server to talk to you.

I wonder if LJ's addition of tags is going to cause people to change the way we partition our posts. Will we tend toward more-numerous, tightly-focused posts, for the benefit of tagging? Or will we keep doing what we already do and if a post has a dozen tags so what? Time will tell.

Earlier this week Dani and I got email from a friend saying, roughly, "so-and-so from the old net days is in town; we've never met or anything, but how about we all get together for dinner?". This sounded just off-the-wall enough to be fun. The person's name was vaguely familiar (Dani spent more time on the relevant newsgroups than I did), but "put random unknown geeks in a room together and see what happens" can be fun sometimes. (This is different from "have dinner with $net.celebrity", where the participants don't feel equal.)

Entry tags:

tags discovery

I've just learned that when you ask LJ to display entries with a particular tag (by clicking on the tag's link in an entry), you only get the 100 most recent entries with that tag. In some areas I'd been thinking in terms of uber-tags and sub-tags (e.g. "judaism, torah"), on the theory that this would give me a way to get the entire category or only subcategories, but that's not going to work. In practice, if you've got 1500+ entries like I do (not that I've tagged that many yet, but think in the long term), broad categories just aren't going to work.

Edit: Ran into another limitation; there seems to be an age limit or something. At the time I checked I had one category with 77 entries, but I only got 55 of them on the "view this tag" pages before it kicked over to the "one day at a time" view that you run into eventually from the "recent entries" page. That wouldn't be so bad if the "previous" links took me to the next-earlier entry with this tag, but it's just the previous entry. I was about six months back in my journal at this point. With luck, this is considered to be a bug and not a feature...

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S2 questions

There are a couple customizations I'd like to be able to make to my journal under S2. Does anyone reading this have advice?

I'm using the Generator style because it has (mostly) decent fonts and isn't horribly wasteful of screen space. The first thing I'd like to do -- and I hope this is easy -- is make the font for the "tags" line bigger. I want to leave the rest of the font sizes alone. (Well, I wouldn't overly object to the comment links being bigger, but they're ok as is too.)

The second thing I'd like to do is more complicated. On my customized S1 friends page, I placed the box with the userpic and journal name on the left for public entries and on the right for locked entries. Yes, there's also the little lock icon, but I want more of a visual clue than that. Ideally I'd be able to do that, but I'm open to other ways for making locked posts visually different.