GeeCee's Not-Entirely-Original Miscellany

There is currently a CSRF designed to mislead you into believing LiveJournal is requesting your username and password, when the data is actually being requested by a third party who is trying to gain access to your account.

See http://lj-support.livejournal.com/840844.html for details; if you've entered your LJ login credentials in a pop-up that looks like the one below, 1) you ought to get a smack upside your head, and 2) you're gonna want to go change your password right about now.

Coolio. http://www.livejournal.com/statistics/ (For paid/permanent accounts; widely announced in this news post and marta elaborates in paidmembers over here. Please direct all wank about it over to one of the community posts; thank you, drive through.)

If you don't want to show up in the "My Guests" stats (which means you don't get that data in your own stats either), you can check your privacy settings here and enable or disable it. For the record, I don't intend to enable it here

LJ maintenance window with downtime coming up Real Soon Now (like, starting 40 minutes from now if I read correctly). For the scoop, head on over to lj_maintenance. (ohnotheydidnt broke LJ! Okay, not really, but they did run into some database limitations due to the insane number of comments in the community.)

Did a bit of reading list trimming, because I'm spending way too much time on LJ to the detriment of other things that need my attention. There may be another pass in a bit, once I see how the time management thing's working out for me. (From the userinfo: "Also, if I remove someone it has nothing to do with my assessment of your worth as a human being. Really. It's more a reflection of a need for better time management on my part.")

San Francisco, CA - December 3, 2007 - Six Apart, the world's leading independent blogging software and services company, today announced that SUP, an international media company, has acquired LiveJournal (LJ), the pioneer of social networking communities online used by millions of people around the world to connect through personal journals and topic-based communities. SUP has launched an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.


moar funny pictures

Comment editing is coming for paid users. (link seen in a f-locked post) I'm relieved to see that the plan is that comments which have been replied to can't be edited, which is one of the big problems I could see with the whole "allow comments to be modified" thing.

A couple of handy new features, courtesy lj_releases:
* For Paid users: "Notify me when someone votes in a poll I posted"
* Adding linklist support to a bunch of layouts
* Going forward, you can view up to 1000 entries per tag (rather than 100). If an entry is no longer displaying on the tag view, you'll need to re-tag it so that it displays, but any future entries you tag will automatically be included in the tag view.

I have less than zero money right now to contribute myself, but if you would like to help defray some medical costs that will allow friends of a friend to keep their beloved and newly-diagnosed diabetic cat, cyan_blue is organizing donations. (Yes, I know, "send money for medical care for a cat" is a time-honored LJ scam. I trust cyan_blue though, and the cat belongs to one of her partners; lots of people I know also know the people in question. I'm pretty confident this is all aboveboard.)

Since I'm here anyway, might as well make a note of recent reading. OMG, I've been slacking. Three of these were read in the last 10 days though, so maybe the pace will pick up for the rest of the year.

14. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, Crystal Zevon (and apparently everyone who ever knew the man). The book is essentially snippets of stories by people who knew him, and I found the format more than slightly annoying. Yay, epic bad behavior. The man was a genius, but ZOMG would I hate to have been involved with him.


15. The City of Falling Angels, John Berendt. Berendt introduces a fascinating cast of characters while investigating the 1996 fire that destroyed Venice's historic La Fenice opera house. By the time I put the book down, I was even more interested in seeing the city.


16. The Virgin's Lover, Philippa Gregory. I'm really liking Ms. Gregory's historical fiction, at least the bits I've read so far.


17. Island of the Sequined Love Nun, Christopher Moore. One of the few I had yet to read, and again not my favorite. (C'mon, "Lamb" is a really, really high bar to get over.) We have cargo cults, cannibals, wrecked pink Lear jets owned by cosmetics company executives, secret missions to Japan involving [redacted to avoid spoilers], and the beautiful, blonde Sky Priestess. Oh yeah, and Roberto the talking fruit bat. Who doesn't love talking fruit bats? Roberto and Tucker Case will reappear later, in "The Stupidest Angel" (which was much, much more fun, IMO).

Still no net connection at home, although that should change shortly. I'm finding I miss it less than I thought I would, as I can distract myself nicely with the huge pile of unread books I have waiting for me. It makes C.'s job search much easier, though. On that note, anyone know of anything in the DC area (or telecommuting) open for senior-level C++ software engineers? (The catch being "no currently-active security clearance".)

LJ bought by 6A; world fails to implode (despite much insistence that it has).

Seriously. I admit to some amount of skepticism as with any buyout/merger, but I see no evidence yet to think that anything horrible and terrible and awful is going to happen. Most of the things I was most worried about myself (like, are we going to have to move to Typepad-like pricing, which would suck much ass) seem to have been addressed; sure, not completely thoroughly yet, but ferchrissakes it's been less than 24 hours since the announcement. The one thing I haven't seen yet is what happens if 6A decides it wants to be bought by Microsoft or Apple or some other large corporate entity, but it's been asked often enough I'd be at least a little surprised if that doesn't get addressed at some point.

I wouldn't have paid for my accounts for four-plus years if I didn't have some amount of faith in the folks running this company, so I'm giving Brad the benefit of the doubt and believing that he really does have the best interests of this site that he built in mind and sticking around until at least the end of my paid membership in November. I'll re-evaluate then, as I always do. If things have started to suck, I won't renew my paid account. I honestly don't get the rash of panic and threatening to flee for the hills right now I'm seeing in various places. The reason I'm with LJ rather than hosting my own blog is because I enjoy the sense of community; if everyone jumps ship pre-emptively because of what "might" happen someday, that will pretty much destroy what makes LJ special without our new corporate overlords 6A having had to do a damn thing. No?

[Edit:] For those who care, here's the diff of the TOS versions 1.4 and 1.5. (Found in a comment to a locked post elsewhere.)

Best support request evar.


I got a big ol'box o'Lush goodies today as a Christmas present from patgreene, who rocks like a rocking thing. Mmmm, bath bombs.</gloat>