Date: 2008-07-07 11:27 Subject: ho'D Security: Public Current Mood: relieved

Had to dig a bit further into LJ's style stuff, but I got my old theme back. This stuff has come a long way since I first cobbled this theme together. The real challenge for making a new theme will be to figure out where S2 code stops and CSS begins.

Or maybe I'll just keep what I've got and be glad I'm not a web designer.

Date: 2008-07-05 16:25 Subject: D'oh! Security: Public Current Mood: disappointed

Whenever someone does a voice post, it completely clobbers my custom Scrabble LJ theme. I've never gotten around to finding and fixing whatever bug in my hacked up S2 code causes it. I usually just switch over to a new theme then switch back when the voice post moves off my first friends page.

This just happened for the first time in several months, and in the meantime, LJ has come up with a much cleaner way of switching themes. They give you a nice list of theme types, one of which is "your custom layers". Cool. Switched to a different one, no muss, no fuss.

Came time to switch back, I told it to apply my custom theme, and BOOM, I'm right back at the unadorned "Refried Paper" theme, on which mine was based.

I've got a backup of my mods someplace, but I think instead of searching all over for them, I'll make a new one using a different base theme. Refried Paper had a lot of quirks in it that "Expressive," "Flexible Squares," etc., don't. And the code is very unmodular; I found myself copying huge functions just to make one-line changes that should rightly have been parameterized out.

But the whole point of this is that if you have customizations you want to keep, make backup copies before you switch, because they may disappear into the LJ ether...

Date: 2008-04-16 11:10 Subject: Just for the record Security: Public Current Mood: embarrassed

I'm a hypocrite. I mean that literally.

I just advised kangarau that she should not bother with CGP and instead post whatever she wants to say in her LJ.

OTOH, I self-censor like mad on this journal. This is partly because I don't ever want to take it friends-only, but also because I never trust that something posted online won't eventually leak out to the public.

This goes back to my USENET days, starting 25 years ago. Disk space was very expensive, and the perceived value-add of devoting a lot of it to noisy flame-filled newsgroup traffic was very low. Plus, if you were unlucky enough not to be AT&T, there were substantial dial-up modem charges to contend with as well. Thus, with the exception of a few newsgroups like net.sources, USENET traffic was "expired", i.e. deleted, very shortly after it arrived, usually from 2-14 days, and it was never backed up.

We lived by the saying, "Never post anything you wouldn't want your future employers to read." The general public didn't have "net access" as it was called, but any company any of us would work for likely did, so the danger was that you may apply for a job someplace, and have your interviewer know you in an unfavorable light from what you posted that morning.

Fast-forward 25 years. It turns out someone (and I think I know who) did back up lots of USENET traffic, and the tapes never disintegrated. And, they found their way to the forerunner of Google Groups. Which is why something I thought would disappear forever after a couple weeks ended up here.

There are lots of opinions I'd like to express here, personal stories I'd like to tell, hopes and fears I'd like to discuss. But even though this is my journal, it is also a public forum, and even if I were to take it "private", no level of actual privacy could be assumed. The only way to do that would to create an anonymous, friends-only, invite-only journal, but even then, some not-very-creative data mining could establish the connection between it and me.

Which leaves me with in the hypocritical state of asking people to do as I say, not as I do.

Date: 2007-12-10 11:26 Subject: All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth Security: Public Current Mood: greedy

If wedding registries are crass but everybody has them anyway, why not take it one step further?

Date: 2007-11-27 10:04 Subject: Happy birthdays... Security: Public Current Mood: awake

...to bpende and thesnark!

Date: 2007-10-25 23:53 Subject: I hate forgetting stuff Security: Public Current Mood: embarrassed

Like the fact that kdiddy moved off LJ to her own WordPress-based blog, which she announced publicly, and from which she set up kdiddyorg, an RSS feed back into LJ, which I forgot to add, and so here I've been in agreement with a few others that my flist has turned into one long Scrabblelog, and that's partly true because people like mockngbirdgirl and ridiculicious are all but silent, and even stalwarts like thesnark are a lot less verbose these days, what with life impinging upon blogging time and all, but hey, if I'm not doing what I need to do to get precisely the neat content I've been missing, then it's my own damn fault, right?

Hey, but spherulitic's Humanopodes are back, and a bunch of the Scrabblers have said they'd start posting about life (jigsawn's made good on it, among others) and not just bingo lists from tournaments--hope springs eternal.

Date: 2007-09-18 11:19 Subject: Zen Time Suckage Security: Public Current Mood: entranced

We in the LJ world don't spend much time on That Other Site. But my travels took me to the blog I had there before I came here. There's no content--I moved that over here--just a message saying I've left.

But I did find out about something that I could stare at for hours: http://play.blogger.com.

You have been warned.

Date: 2007-07-11 11:05 Subject: Milestone! Security: Public Current Mood: accomplished

My LJ got its 10,000th hit today! It only took 2.5 years and 400+ entries. I'm popular, yo!

Date: 2006-08-03 09:04 Subject: Calling enya2003 Security: Public Current Mood: mystified

Overnight, I got an email from enya2003 inviting me to join LJ. I'm already here. :)

Would you happen to be the person who commented anonymously in my last post? Inquiring minds want to know.

Date: 2006-06-26 13:01 Subject: New layout Security: Public Current Mood: blah

No, I haven't given up Scrabble.

My Scrabble-themed layout is a heavily modified version of the S2 "Refried Paper" layout.  There is a bug somewhere in my layout customizations that causes my friends page to go nuts every time someone on my friends list leaves a voice post.  I don't have time to debug it right now, so for the moment I've switched to this more generic layout.  LJ is saying that they're coming out with some new Grand Unified Style System sometime soon, so I may wait and reconstruct my regular layout using that.

Date: 2006-03-10 11:26 Subject: Stand and be recognized Security: Public Current Mood: waiting on a long download

I've been friended by esdscrabble and temporus, but I can't remember who you are (I'm as bad with LJ usernames as I am with RL names). Comment here and I'll add you back.

Wow. I was just looking over my custom friends groups. Maybe it's overkill, given how few posts I make that are protected in any way. Lessee, there's:

• IRL/non-IRL, people I know/don't know in person;
  
• Non-local, people not located in or near central Jersey;
  
• Scrabble players;
  
• Liberals, for preaching to the converted (and not inflaming the rest);
  
• Closest: Anything I wouldn't tell these people is unsafe for LJ at all.
  

reillye

Date: 2006-02-15 09:55 Subject: VD = WMD Security: Public Current Mood: cynical

I'm convinced that for the majority, Valentine's Day is nothing more than a weapon of mass deflation.

Reading my friends page yesterday and the day before, what was interesting was that a) people seemed to experienced elevated agita, often not directly related to Valentine's Day, and b) it also wasn't necessarily connected with their romantic relationships (or lack thereof).

So is it that Valentine's Day puts some indeterminate pressure on people, or maybe bring to the fore parts of people's psyches that normally stay in the background? If it's supposed to be such a big celebration of love, why did so many people appear to be brought down yesterday?

(My own opinion is that whatever its origins, Valentine's Day has become the one Hallmark Holiday that still has teeth in it, what they wish they could make out of "Grandparents' Day", "Sweetest Day", etc.)

Date: 2006-02-14 23:12 Subject: No {No,Jo}hari Security: Public Current Mood: intimidated

If I'm in the right mood, I can be a sucker for memes. The rating communities would trash me for it. But I'm deliberately staying away from the Johari and Nohari thingamabobs. The words, both positive and negative, are just too value-laden, and words I'd commonly use to describe people aren't even there, on either list. I only did them for one other person, and I don't feel too good about how that turned out.

But the real reason I won't subject myself to this sort of thing goes back to an exercise an old boss had us do. He called it "peer feedback" or some such, and it worked like this: You write down a sentence or two about a coworker on a piece of paper. The coworker get the sentences written about them from each of the other members of the group. Everything is anonymous, you can say whatever you want, and nobody but the writer and the intended recipient see them.

I got a few comments like, "I'm glad we have someone around here who knows the hardware so well," "You make other people's jobs easier," and the like. But I also got, "I wish you didn't talk so much," and "You don't know as much as you think you know." Those left me in an embarrassed funk for days, but because of the ground rules, I couldn't tell anyone about it.

If that's what happened when the feedback was unrestricted, there's no way I'm ever going to ask people specifically to say bad things about me!

Date: 2006-01-06 11:22 Subject: Technical: New anti-spam measure for my personal email Security: Public Current Mood: grateful

200th journal entry and it's not even a meme!

( This is for those of you who use my personal email address. If you use my work email or the gmail address listed in my LJ profile, you can ignore this. )

Date: 2006-01-01 14:05 Subject: IP address test Security: Public Current Mood: curious

Leave an anonymous comment, so I can see the IP address.

I'm really doing this to find out the IP addresses associated with the zillion different places I post/comment from. I'll delete this post when I have the info I want.

Date: 2005-12-19 13:30 Subject: Dropped emails Security: Public Current Mood: annoyed

For the second time in a few days, I've asked someone about an email I sent them earlier and their answer started out with "I guess you didn't get my reply, but..."

I'm an email pack-rat and delete almost nothing, yet their original messages weren't there. I've also checked my junk folders to make sure there are no false positives. All I can conclude is that at least a few emails to me have been dropped on the floor. I apologize for the inconvenience.

ETA: If mail to my personal address bounces, please send the bounce message to me at the Gmail address listed in my profile. If I get several similar bounces from different sources, that'll be a pretty clear indication that the problem is on my end.

Date: 2005-11-16 12:24 Subject: Self-Censorship Security: Public Current Mood: peaceful Current Music: Boring Wednesday telecon

Deadlines and commitments
What to leave in
What to leave out

Everyone here on LJ is caught in an internal conflict: On the one hand, you want to write whatever you feel like putting down on virtual paper. On the other, you have to be cognizant of your audience. Somewhere in the middle is what you write. ( And for me that's... )

Date: 2005-11-10 17:04 Subject: LJ Sociology newbie question Security: Public Current Mood: constantly interrupted Current Music: constant interruptions

Awhile back I asked a question about why some people make their journals friends-only, and got good responses (and a couple of new friends). Here's another question for this august gathering:

What's the deal with rating communities? I am in need of enlightenment.

As part of my random LJ wanderings over the last year, I've looked through a few of them and kind of wrote them off as high-school cliques brought over to LJ, but then I noticed that a couple of people on my friends list are/were in them, and those people, along with not being 15 years old, don't seem at all cliquish to me.

You fill out the questionnaire (which for some reason always asks you for your stand on abortion). By some process, the people in the community decide to accept you or not. I've seen people accept one person and reject another based on identical answers, so there's some subjective component there, too. What happens then? For the most part there didn't seem to be any significant traffic in any of these communities besides applications. Absent anything else, this looks to me like those journal-rating communities, except that instead of being told what a crappy writer you are, you're told you aren't cool enough.

So what's the appeal, other than the satisfaction of running the gauntlet and not being treated to a dose of solicited humiliation?

Date: 2005-10-10 10:53 Subject: Is it a sign from God... Security: Public Current Mood: annoyed Current Music: Somebody testing ringtones

...if I click the wrong thing and a long post I've been working on in between work fires all morning suddenly evaporates? That maybe I never should have posted it?

Hint: If you're preparing a post, and you see a paragraph that is so much of a digression that it deserves its own post, don't click on "journal -> Update", thinking you can dash off that one-paragraph post then come back to the one you were working on. For some reason, the new update page replaces the existing one--the back button does not do what you think it should.

Grr.

Date: 2005-09-30 14:55 Subject: Friends-only? Security: Public Current Mood: perplexed Current Music: ringtone cacophony

So here's the thing I don't get about friends-only journals. [Note: I understand invitation-only journals that people have in addition to their public journals. That's not what I'm talking about here.]

There have been two ways I've met my LJ friends (other than those I already knew IRL). Some I've stumbled across by clicking random users who share Scrabble my interests. The rest make posts in communities I watch, or comment on my existing friends' posts. What they say intrigues me, so I go check out their journals. In a lot of cases, all I see is a "friends-only/comment to be added" banner.

Then I think about what would happen next, if I presume that their journal is as interesting as whatever of theirs I had read. I comment. The person thinks, "Yeah, I don't know this guy from a sack of coat hangers, and he wants me to friend him? Riiiiight." I move on.

So I guess I wonder what going completely friends-only does, as opposed to making individual posts friends-only. If your journal is friends-only, I'd like to hear why you did it, and how you get to know new people.