archaelus

Today was a bit of a strange day. The laptop I've had for many moons, a Vaio SZ, suddenly decided to fail. And fail rather fatally. One thing I've learnt over the years is, esp when I'm not happy with a machine being broken, I am best not to try to gut and fix laptops. Not very careful am I with them.

Headed over to Jes's place and after she carefully opened up the laptop, eliminated all the easy to replace parts (ram, drive). And while the BIOS was half-alive, it was nonetheless not POSTing properly. This made me, well, upset, since the SZ has been great for the things I've been asking it to do.. yes, it's GPU is dating badly, but it was the 'netbook' for stupid big stumpy hand people like me :)

Also, I can't actually afford to replace it at the moment. There had been some thought about eventually replacing it with the Vaio CW, and handing the SZ on to someone who could put it good use.

So, I'm pondering my options, when Little David arrives, carrying a CW box. For me.

Apparently, while carefully directing me to still have interest in the CW at some point (I was pondering whether I would get one at all now, unsure at all what I should do now really!), Jes was quietly arranging with Little David to get a new CW picked up, in the colour I had pointed out in shop (a deep purple and black two-tone) when Jes was picking hers up. This was originally planned for closer to when they are departing for new shores, but with the early death of the SZ, this got rapidly brought forward.

I am still, many hours later, utterly stunned. Completely stunned. Nothing I expected at all, and Jes suggesting the CW would be a good fit while plotting to get one to me, I never saw it coming at all!

Is very rare that I feel quite so loved as I do now. I am hugely indebted to them both for just so much support, and looking after me :)

Is also very nice to be able to sit on the couch and play WoW in full detail :)

I remember standing at the sink, my mother sighing at me in frustration.

'Watch how I do it. You need to use some force, just waving the cloth around the plate wont get it clean'

I watched her hands, so strong and capable, the bone and sinew so clearly outlined against her browned skin. She made it look so easy with her woman's hands.

Looking down, I see my hands as though for the first time since then. Strong and capable, scarred and darkened, the bone and sinew so clearly outlined against my browned skin. A woman's hands, to carry woman's burden.

Originally published at coffee.geek.nz. Please leave any comments there.

born 6:17am on 10th December 2009.

more photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/taniwha/sets/72157622988101788/

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.

I heard about three new Lisp-powered games this week.

First is a "silly geodefense clone wannabe," Towers:

Next is David O'Toole's 7-day roguelike Sanctuary:

And last is Andy Hefner's untitled space game:

Terje Norderhaug wants you to know about MCLIDE:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

MCLIDE is a free open source Macintosh IDE for Lisp implementations on any platform. It's a double-clickable, stand-alone development environment that connects to a Lisp either locally or through the network.

The first public beta of MCLIDE 1.0 is now available from:

    http://mclide.in-progress.com

This version of MCLIDE works with Clozure CL (a.k.a. OpenMCL) and Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) as target lisp implementations. Support for a number of other lisp implementations on different platforms is under development.

MCLIDEs user interface is based on the mature IDE of Macintosh Common Lisp. It provides rich interactive development and debugging tools in the form of dialogs interacting with the target Lisp.

MCLIDE provides a consistent developer experience regardless of the Lisp. It can be used on the same computer as the Lisp system, or target one or more Lisp implementations on other computers or operating systems.

Special thanks to Peter Paine for substantial feedback and suggestions. His involvement has been essential in moving MCLIDE forward. Glen Foy has provided a lisp syntax styling utility as an optional plug-in. MCLIDE has also benefitted from contributions by Shannon Spires and Madhu, among others.

Follow the progress of MCLIDE at www.twitter.com/mclide

-- Terje Norderhaug
   terje@in-progress.com

Check out the MCLIDE screenshots for some Lispy eyecandy.

Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

Introducing My Stats. If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now see detailed reports on how many people are visiting your journal, friends pages, and entries (wherever they're posted on LiveJournal). You can also view data on comments and RSS requests. My Stats is only available to Paid and Permanent account holders, but you can upgrade anytime. (FYI, an annual subscription costs less than a large pizza with everything on it, PLUS it's rumored to make you lose weight in your sleep!) For additional details on this feature, read this article in paidmembers.

Get ready to check your vital statistics!. To begin, mouse over Journal in the upper nav bar and select My Stats from the dropdown menu (Horizon) or select My Stats under Journal in the side bar (Vertigo). If you're using another design scheme, you can visit My Stats directly. You'll find My Guests on the My Stats tool bar.

Happy holiday promotion!

We're delighted to tell you about our holiday coupons, which will help you share the love with your LiveJournal friends! If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can send up to 10 LiveJournal Basic/Plus users a $10 coupon for an annual paid subscription now through January 15th, 2010. Recipients can upgrade for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25). Please note that these coupons are not transferable and cannot be used to renew existing paid accounts. If you're a Paid/Permanent user, you can send out your holiday coupons now!

Tweaks and Enhancements

1. The search is on: We've replaced our default search tool with one from Yandex, a leader in search engine technology. This means you'll get smarter, more granular results! To get started, enter your search terms and click the Go button to the left of the Find box on the upper right of the LiveJournal header. This will take you to the search landing page where you can further refine by Entries, Comments, People & communities, and FAQs. You can also access the search page directly.
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3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!

Here's a part-time web job with a Lispy angle:

Requirements: Programming will consist of Javascript, CSS, and Ajax, within a browser (DOM) environment; experience with all of these is essential. Some familiarity with a Lisp-like language, such as Common Lisp (preferred), Scheme, or Clojure essential. Ability to work independently required. Physical location near Berkeley CA or Richmond VA is desirable, but anywhere in the world is possible.

Google's DNS impairs CDN performance. On both of my colo systems, there are Akamai CDN caches within a few hops and under 3ms. With Google DNS, it's around 10 hops and almost 30ms. Ouch.

taste_buds
Holidays provide a built-in excuse for indulgent entertaining. This all-purpose foodie community covers everything from homemade hangover cures to dinner party menus. Need quick advice? Get five-minute snack suggestions, low-fat ingredient substitutes, and even measurement conversions. Delicious recipes garnished with humorous advice. Yum.

naturesbeauty
Always on the lookout for compelling images, we were delighted to discover this flourishing community of artists who share a love of nature. Honoring the subject with photographs, paintings, sketches, prose, poetry, and other creative works, you'll be simultaneously riveted to your monitor and inspired to run helter skelter towards the nearest wooded dale.

I've been doing a lot of thinking and talking lately about what is important to me, and what I want for my life. We're hoping to move soon, to one of two possible locations. One of them relies on me getting a job I'm currently interviewing for. I hope to know soon.

If we do end up moving overseas, a lot of what we own won't be coming with us. I've long felt that I wanted to own fewer things of higher quality. Now that I am with a partner who agrees, we've decided to take the plunge into minimalism. Not only will we spend less money, time, and head-space on 'stuff' but we will be able to live in a smaller space, consuming less resources. We already know we can live in each other's pockets, and D's stint of living at my apartment, and mine at his house, showed us we didn't miss the majority of our possessions when they weren't there.

We've identified what is important to us, and what we need to achieve to get there. We both want to spend more time at home together and more time preparing our own food, making working from home a priority and ruling out long commutes and on-call.

It's nice to know exactly what we want to get out of our lives, and what we need to do to get it. As soon as I find appropriate work, we're ready.

Decided to go with option 4 on the things to make list. Since everyone glazed over on that, option 4 was "make proper final production-grade NTP server". Parts have been ordered for one, PCBs are on the way, and this time I actually made sure I could order everything required for the little pads I have on the board. This will reduce "uh-oh" factor.

Have a bit of a headache, but heading out anyway. Is Sophie's first night with her stylish new mic. And it's a good chance to take some interesting pictures.

I haven't been taking many for the 3 a day, because .. umm.. I ran out of ideas :) This is the difference between three pictures of my day (which would be the same three over and over) and three interesting pictures.

WoW continues to be awesome. Attempted the new raid instance and immediately fell about the place in laughter. It's nicely designed and feels properly epic for facing and taking down the Lich King. The new 5-man dungeons are also excellent and properly hard, but because of that they provide a very useful bridge in gear between what you can do at 80 in a 5-man group, and the current raid content. On 5-Normal it's i219 gear, which is very well itemized even for that stat budget, and 5-Heroic is i232, in general somewhere between Ulduar-25 and TOC-25. Considering those are both 25-man raids, it's excellent gear for alts and quickly gearing up people who want to raid. Nice job Blizz :)

Umm.. Not much else to say :) Continue to apply for jobs, see how that pans out :)

Yannick Gingras has released mini-fract 0.6, which you can use to make fractal movies.

Google it, as in:

“Doctors told us that this is rare, and that our child is the only child in The County with this condition,” Jamie Guerrette said Tuesday. “When she was born, we were basically told, ‘Your daughter has bilateral microtia with atresia. Google it.’”

— Community seeks to help girl get needed surgery

Tweaks and enhancements

• As a number of you reported, a service interruption impaired sending and receiving notifications for a couple of days. This was due to an avalanche of snowflake cookies. We've removed the free snowflake cookie and unclogged the pipeline. Timely notifications should resume shortly. Please note that there's a backlog in our queues, so you'll be getting earlier notifications first. For more details, check out this post at lj_maintenance.
• In anticipation of the new year, we've embarked on a self-improvement kick to boost our backend (pun semi-intended). This will allow us to offer you a holiday promotion in the next few weeks (yes, we're listening and working very hard to make it happen). We sincerely appreciate your continued patience and support.

Holiday vgifts are here!

We've added some fantastic new vgifts to help you spread holiday cheer. We also hope you'll honor AIDS Awareness Month by purchasing virtual red ribbons. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine.

Introducing: LJLimericks

We cordially here do invite you
To craft a fine limerick. Might you?
Each week, a new theme,
Then a poll, that's our dream
Winner posted on news to delight you!

In honor of all the brilliant writers on LiveJournal, we've created a brand new community: ljlimericks! Each week, we'll enter a handful of limericks into a poll (which we'll tuck snugly under an LJ-Cut). The winning poem will be published in the following newsletter. In addition, the author will receive a virtual blue ribbon! If you have the time, come drop us a rhyme. Please keep the "Nantucket" stuff on the downlow, since this is a youth-friendly community. Our first prompt is: Insomnia in winter.

Photos of the week

We're back with more incredible images from our global photography community. Congratulations to sempre_marseeya, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our second lj_photophile poll.

We hate to squelch your creativity, but, as a courtesy to other users, please post only one photo at a time and keep the main photo no larger than 350x350 (so images display properly via mobile and on friends pages). You can link to a larger image and/or post photos under a cut. Just so you know, we select photos for the poll blindly, based on user comments and staff feedback. Please continue to vote, comment, and, of course, enjoy. You can check out the week in pictures and view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay warm and safe out there!

backpacking
Want to embrace your wanderlust on the cheap? If you're tall on adventurous spirit, but short on funds, this community can help you plan a trip to anywhere. Offering plentiful tips on how to travel light, you can post about bargain hotels and hostels if you're into urban exploration or discuss camping gear and mosquito netting for the great outdoors. Hitch your backpack, pitch your tent, and carpe diem!

He's HUGE!

Maciej Ceglowski gets into an interesting discussion about Paul Graham's views on art history. Maciej is "idlewords" and Paul Graham is "pg".

As everyone has no doubt noticed, there's not a lot of pictures of my day per se. This would be an endless stream of pictures containing WoW, Rock Band, and a blank one representing sleep. Instead, I've been using the three days thing to just play around with my camera again.

Tonight, we're proving that you can't make any picture more classy by making it black and white. Thus:


I found these two practicing, or busking, I'm not sure entirely who is doing what, walking along Cuba Street.


Ernesto Cafe, corner of Cuba and Ghuznee Streets. I liked how the sign was far brighter than anything else for some ways.


On my way back I saw this young lady waiting for the bus. Again, on Cuba Street.

There we are. I have proved my point! :D