I, for one, welcome our new Overlord.
Apparently, LJ has a new Overlord. The teensy little update on this in lj_biz tells you to go here to read all about it. Seeing the way the comments were going, LJ staff quickly threw away all the comments and disabled further comments.

In other news, InsaneJournal has gained a lot of new users.

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The maximum amount of milk...
...with the minimum amount of moo.

The message at the URL below illustrates how not to achieve that.

http://news.livejournal.com/102286.html

This time, our ingenious LJ team has bestowed on us a new and novel way of annoying your friends. You, yes you, can give to the people on or off your F-list, a can of a new and wonderful beverage invented by An Large Soft Drinks Company. This little can will stay on your profile for a week or two, then disappear. Now if the recipient of that benevolence is a user who has paid not to see ads, then tough. They still get their can-o-soda. Brought to you by $DRINKS_COMPANY. The new invention of corporate-sponsored "V-gifts", it seems, is not well received.

LiveJournal is really turning pissing off their customers into an art form these last few months.

Current Mood: contemplative

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Oh for fuck's sake!
They are at it again. After the unprecedented amount of drama generated by strikethrough '07, our LJ Overlords are once again deleting user accounts with no warning or chance to argue your case. Only this time, the user link (ponderosa121) is no longer a link with a stroke through it, it's now a non-link in bold. The rules are vague to the extreme. Using them, you can probably delete the whole of slashfic. And once you're gone, you're gone.

Morons.

This, of course, has no discernible effect on actual child abuse going on out there in the Real World(TM). This is just a brownnosing exercise for the Concerned Citizens, who might otherwise put off your advertisers. And honestly, how does some dolt writing stuff like:

Oh YES daddy!! Stick your 20-inch cock in my eight-year-old snatch! I feel so horny and underage!!

... actually harm The Children? Slashfic is one of those things that just comes with the territory. While I don't generally read slashfic, I know that some of you on my F-list do, and even (shock horror!) write the occasional piece of smut. Because It's Fun!

Maybe I should start a meme. Everybody who reads this and wants to poke into the eye of the LJ Overlords... Copy the above sentences into your LJ and see what kind of attention this gets you.

Meh. Don't bother. As they say, Bugger This For A Lark, I'm going back to Usenet.

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Attention span of... Oo! Fluffy bears!
Deep sigh... This is what happens when a private organisation develops into a company. Amateurs want to be praised. Professionals want to be paid.

In order to be praised, you need to listen very carefully to your users[1] and give them what they need (which may not necessarily be what they want).

But there's many, many ways in which you can get people to pay you, and you only need to make your service good enough to prevent a mass exodus. If you've been typing loads of stuff into LJ that you really care about, then Six Apart has you by the unmentionables. It's not for nothing that there aren't any good ways to export your data from LiveJournal intact.

Reading through all the communications that the LJ staff has blessed us with lately, the remarks about "the community we (as in Six Apart) wish to build", the promises that don't actually promise anything, the fwuffy bears that have replaced the important news on the front page so as not to disturb the influx of users, I think that the Six Apart people are trying to groom the userbase into a group that their most valued customers would value as willing targets for market research and advertising. As a group like Six Apart, you can make a mint off a thirteen million userbase.

As I said, amateurs want to be praised. Professionals just want to be paid.

My only advice is: be prepared to leave. By whatever means you can, back up the data from your pages. If that means cut-and-pasting it from your webbrowser, then so be it. Because Six Apart can snuff it out at their whim. They already did it once, and they haven't promised not to do it again in the future.

Well, I think this sorry business has run its course. This journal is going to "read-only" mode - there won't be any more entries that I care about. I will post links to whatever I replace it with. I don't know what it'll be, except that I'm certain that it will be on one of my computers.

LFR: http://news.livejournal.com/100060.html?thread=52551388#t52551388

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[1] I'm using the word "users" here quite deliberately because users are not necessarily customers.

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Writer's Block: Words that you love and hate
"What are your favorite and least favorite words? Any reasons why?"

Well, not really favourite, it just would be nice to see them.

HELLO LJ USER. HERE IS A NEW FEATURE THAT YOU CAN ENABLE IF YOU WANT IT

Current Mood: annoyed

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Growl...
In view of the recent LJ silliness where they suspend your account based on the interests you list in your profiles, I have now removed all interests so that I will now hopefully duck below the radar of Warriors Against Bodhran Players or whatever bunch of fruitcakes LJ feels moved to appease tomorrow. For good measure, I have also removed any personal information that never should have been there in the first place.

About these Warriors For Innocence[1], I have my doubts. If I'm feeling charitable, they are a bunch of Concerned Parents(TM). They "hunt down" pedophiles on the internet and write very nasty letters to the editor. Mostly because it makes them feel so good. Why anyone would waste their time arguing with them on their own message board, is beyond me. Obviously, any painful (to them) comments never get to see the light of day.

WFI claim to be "All that stands between the pedophiles on the Internet and your tender little children". I beg to differ. Between my child and the Internet Weirdos, there is me. Believe you me, any paedophile interested in my offspring will find a bunch of people in the Secret Meeting Place who are an order of magnitude older than the pre-teen expected.

Feeling most unfluffy thoughts towards LJ.

[1] Do not go to their website with shields down. It's said to be a den of spyware and keyloggers.

Current Mood: pissed off

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Busy day...
Two main events on a single day. We went to have the 2-week scan done in hospital, and it seems that Spud is doing OK - he was lying on his side looking placid. As far as the lady could see, all was present and correct. Indeed - he. We're having a boy! So those who need to know: the wool is blue. The muisjes are blue. V happily glowing. We got some of the photos, which we will in due course scan and put on-line for the family. Because of the position he was lying in, the photos aren't as clear as they might have been, but we can see a spine. We can see a head and tummy and occasional hand or foot. Good to see Vic relaxing, because she'd been worried.

In other news, I did my "gig" at the Staines Folk & Blues club. It went well - even some of the Maidenhead crowd came to see me, and were given floor spots by Da Man Barry. Couldn't resist inserting "Back home again" by John Denver. It's my first baby! I'm allowed some vom. I think I hit the right balance between the serious songs and the funny ones (Tom Lehrer, Mitch Benn). I think the most important thing to remember is to relax. Which I managed after the first couple of songs. I'd been studying two songs that I don't do too often: Suzanne Vega's "The Queen And The Soldier", which I like for the general content, and Bart Peeters' "She goes Nana", which I like for the interesting chords. Managed to pull them off OK. Maybe next I'll learn the words to Gary Jules' "Mad World". And another cheerful one, or my repertoire will be titled "Music to slit your wrists by". Down, of course. Not across.

Current Mood: accomplished

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Avast behind!
This is one for all you nautical types out there :-D

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Wrap me up in me oilskins and jumper
Excellent night at the Maidenhead Folk club tonight. We had John Connelly as the guest, and he sang several songs, many about fish, and the joys of the beach. But what I didn't know was that he is the man who wrote the song Fiddler's Green. V loves that song, because it gives such an optimistic vision of Heaven, and also because skippers in her experience aren't like that at all, at all.

Wish she'd been there.

Current Mood: happy

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Dresden Files, the series...
Have just watched my second episode of The Dresden Files. I've also read all the books now, up to "Dead beat". Now I was sorta waiting for the series to start getting it right, but after this last episode, I despair of it.

• Morgan helping harry? Come on!
  
• Murphy should be cute, blonde, deadly at Aikido and crushed under the heel of her superiors.
  
• A Warden of the White Council hobnobbing with Hellspawn? Yeah right!
  
• Bob is a non-corporeal spirit. He doesn't do lightshows, nor does he take human form. The lewdness they did pick up on for some reason.
  
• They replaced the Blue Beetle with a jeep!
  

I wonder if Jim Butcher would approve...

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Well that was pointless.
Gr.

So the shop has closed for the holidays, and all that's left are the Security guys and poor little me. It is, of course, because the normal crowd have left the building that I am here, because our backups have been failing in interesting ways. And my challenge for today is to convert our JFS volumes to JFS2 volumes. You see, after the Great Upgrading, our normal backup (split off mirror, back up mirror while database purrs on, re-join the mirror) worketh no more. So we now kick everybody out in the wee small hours of the morning, shut down the database, back up everything, then start everything again[1]. With promises that this will be fixed.

So I spend a Quiet Day at the Office turning one mirrored volume group into two unmirrored volume groups, copying over the whole shebang[2], then trying to start the database. Of course, it shits itself. So I call $BOSS_WHO_WOT_OF_DATABASE, who can't come over right now, but will be in next day. Next day, $BOSS spends a few hours beating the Database into submission, and finally, lo and behold! A great light shines out of the monitor. It works. In the distance, the Castle of Happiness can be seen. So then I spend the better part of an hour surfing teh Intarweb while the disk arrays re-mirror themselves. Ah good. All up to date on the Monastery, all my Travian villages are growing as desired, and the disks are once more mirrored. Now to put in that new backup script I've been writing, and I can go home.

Put in script. Little nuggets of disk space are put aside to store much needed information. All that remains is to mount the resulting volume and run the backup on it.

And then... The mount command informs me, that this "snapshot" flag that I'm trying to use, in fact have used on other occasions, is not in its vocabulary.

Lovely. I think I have just spent two of my holidays at work for a result of exactly bugger all. Will phone IBM when next I come in and beat the crap out of them until one tells me what I have to do to have the mount command behave as described in the manual pages.

For now... Time to enjoy the rest of the hols.

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[1] Yes, I know databases can be backed up without shutting the buggers down. It's just that certain choices made by my predecessors have rendered this approach infeasible.

[2] Someone, somewhere has spread the malicious rumour that putting millions of tiny little files in a file system is a perfectly acceptable way of storing financial records for Posterity. That person will be strapped to a chair with an air-tight face mask that he can only remove when these files finish copying.

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I want one!
http://www.craftsmanshipmuseum.com/Ho.htm

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And in other news...
Ik word een Folk Club Regular! Er zijn nu twee clubs waar ik op maandag en op donderdag heen ga. Staines en Maidenhead. Gisteren was er een speciale gast in Staines, dus in plaats van onze gebruikelijke achterkamer in "The Bells", zaten we in een van de zijkamers van St. Mary's Church.

De gast was een of andere niet-erg-bekende figuur met gitaar-en-zang. Zelf geschreven liederen, maar niet buitengewoon. De "regulars" kregen eerst een kans - drie liedjes per keer. Dan een half uur lang voor de gast, dan de rest van de regulars en dan nog een keer de gast. Het viel me op dat de regulars normaal veel beter zijn dan nu. Misschien lag het aan de iets grotere ruimte.

Mijn drie bijdragen waren: "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda", "Black is the colour" en "Missing you". En het ging best goed, al zeg ik het zelf. Alleen irriteerde ik me een beetje aan die vrouw die er op stond om mee te zingen. Net in een ander cadans dan ik. Als je dat doet, doe het dan verdikke zachtjes.

Mijn andere club is de Maidenhead Folk Club. Dat zijn de donderdagen. MFC is net wat groter dan de Staines Blues & Folk Club. Waar Staines normaal het "singaround" formaat gebruikt (d.w.z. stoelen in een kring en om de beurt een liedje), gebruikt Maidenhead de "Floor spot" methode, waar je een lijst maakt van alle mensen die zijn komen opdagen, die dan om de beurt voor de rest van de folks optreden: Twee liedjes, ophoepelen.

Staines is voornamelijk gitaren met hier en daar een banjo of een mandoline. In Maidenhead zie je ook vaak violen (sorry "fiddles"), harmonica's en concertina's. In beide clubs ben ik de enige met een bodhran.

Ik denk dat de zanglessen hebben geholpen. Vooral de ademtechniek (zuig je buik vol lucht, niet je borstkas). Laatst heb ik "Sally Gardens" gezongen zonder me compleet belachelijk te maken. En die is niet zo makkelijk als het lijkt. Lange zinnen en zo.

Het is in ieder geval een goede stimulans om mijn repertoire wat uit te breiden. Donderdag krijg ik als het goed is van iemand de tekst van een lied over windmolens.

Goed. Tijd voor Echt Werk.

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Dear Livejournal...
Here is a template for a new feature announcement:

---

Hello LJ User,

We have just added this wonderful and great feature that will allow you to $WONDERFUL_THING! We are *SO* convinced that this will enhance your life in many many wonderful ways WHEN YOU TURN IT ON. To keep your data from being splattered all over the place, WE HAVE NOT ENABLED IT WITHOUT ASKING YOU. Just know that $WONDERFUL_FEATURE is there IF AND WHEN YOU WANT IT.

Please forgive us for being so late in adding this to LiveJournal, because we have been extremely busy MAKING SURE THAT THE EXISTING FEATURES WORK PROPERLY.

Love,
Your LJ Team.

---

No need to thank me. Thank you!

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Royalty taking an interest...
Hmm. It seems we have an Earl on the premises. This of course means that all visitors are banned. Including the friendly people who collect and bring our daily backup tapes.

When, Mr. Security Guard, were you going to notify me of this? All the guy needed to do was exchange one case of tapes for another.

Current Mood: pissed off

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Lyrics link
Lyrics here!

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Go to Maidenhead
Went to the Maidenhead Folk Club last night. It was Guest Night, and the guest was George Papavgeris. He's a Greek guy who emigrated to the UK a few years back. He did not sing "To Kokoraki". Bought one of his CDs. I also got a floor spot, and sang Tom Lehrer's Irish Ballad and "Black is the colour". I like this club, even though the average age is a bit on the high side. Miles of difference with another place, where you have to do your soft and sensitive singing in the room right next to the blaring speakers in the pub.

The singers at MFC are pretty good - will have to make some effort to keep up with the general quality. There's also a whole world of songs out there that I have never heard yet, let alone learnt. Will apply expertise picked up here to future DW-related events.

Some of these songs are quite, quite suited for depressing the hell out of people, which appears to be my forte :)

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Wordmaster Will
If you see this on your Friend List, quote some Shakespeare:

Grab your seat while I grab my quill
Now shut the f--- up for the Wordmaster Will
Cristopher Marlowe, you'd better stay out of my way
I drop BOMBS when I write my plays, bitch
Using my skillz and my talent with grammar ta
Kick your ass in iambic pentameter
Lend me your ear, even the lobe
Saturday night, you find me in the Globe

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DWCON part deux
Around me, the Con is slowly drawing to a close. The closing ceremony is at four, but there isn't much for me to go to. Time for some reflections and wibbling into LJ.

On the Sunday, we stayed in rather late, and so missed breakfast. I applied myself to the sausages inna bun, and found myself wishing for some of Mr. Dibbler's specialties. They compensated for this by rampant over-pricing. There is probably something in commercial law that says that all people at cons shall be charged exorbitant amounts for meager wares.

And so we came to the Toast and Jam. I have mixed feelings about this event. It's announced as an event where anyone can come in with their instrument and sing their happiest song. Unfortunately, there is a once-a-year band that takes up most of the time, with some small pauses for other people while the incumbents re-tar their insides. As it happens, the players are quite good, but they can be a bit overpowering. Got booted off stage after half a song, the other half being blanked out by Soviet jamming signals. Sodded off and played the guitar in the hallways instead. Much more satisfying.

Now traditionally, the Musician's guild is not one of the guilds that is most likely to win the guild point awards. However, I earned the guild about sixty tokens just by busking in one of the hallways. It's the hallway between the Hub and the rest of the hotel. It is largely unfurnished and relatively small. This means I can actually hear myself playing, even if I play softly. Passers-by actually do appreciate it! So perhaps for the next con, it'd be a good idea to hack into the hotel's audio system and set up shop (i.e. upturned hat) here and there in the many eateries/drinkeries. We may even beat the Seamstresses that way!

Another thing is that there seems to be a Great Need for a folk singing event. Witness our event with the Monstrous Regiment folksongs. It was at the *rse end of the schedule: 10:00am on the Saturday, and still we managed to fill up about two thirds of the Dysk. While I was on, I could spot several people in the crowd joining in, and Jayzes, it was gorgeous. Mind you, they sang with me!

Well, battery is running out, must post this while it lasts, then hug people who are leaving.

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Livefrom the DWCON
Hello Sports fans!

Just a short message, live from the Discworld Convention. So far, it's Good! Did some light Gofering, some Watch duty, which means basically that you stand around near the entrance of events, and politely mention to people that merchants will tear them to tiny bits if their beverage will find its way to the merchandise.

Of course, lots of people in all kinds of costumes, some more revealing than the others. The corsetting industry is well represented. A good corset is a powerful presentation tool. I did attend the Maskerade, where the most extravagant costumes are shown. Of special note was "Mr. Shiny", basically a disco-ball come to life.

I myself took part in one of the events: stlemur had an item on the folk songs that were referenced in Monstrous Regiment. Together with Lonecat, countertony, the_hatstand and myself, we performed some of these songs while Edmund explained the significance of the songs. We were playing in the big hall (the Dysk), and there was quite a large audience,much to our surprise. I had specially learned "Johnny has gone for a soldier", and sang that. It was actually well received, go me! We also played and sang "Sweet Polly Oliver", "The World Turned Upside Down", and "Poor Old Soldier". Not to mention a three-part rendition of "Hanging on the old barbed wire". When we came to the end of the story, we still had some minutes left, so I sang "The Band Played Waltyzing Matilda", thoroughly depressing everybody. Can't give anyone the impression that War is actually fun, now can we? After that, Mr. Pratchett himself came up on the stage and gave us a very authentic folksong - A capella. The final song was by a brave volunteer, known as "Finsterer Fred", who borrowed Edmund's guitar and san an excellent Irish exile song. (As Mr Christy Moore once remarked, the main export of Ireland is people). And with that, the event was over. I think we did well.

So now i'm typing this from a borrowed laptop in the Hub. We missed breakfast, so I think I'll get one of these horribly overpriced sausages inna bun.

Some girl just had me smote for taking her picture. So now,of course, my quest is to get a nice pic of her. *grin*

Current Mood: Happy

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