Selenay's Ramblings

Wow, LJ is getting kicked around pretty badly, huh? Sometimes it's so easy to forget that LJ/DW etc. aren't just used by fannish folks to post porn. Then the Kremlin tries to take down LJ with repeated DDoS attacks (so the rumour mill says) and you kind of end up remembering anyway.

Huh.

I am now glad that I did a full back-up over here a few months ago and have been cross-posting ever since. I should probably back up my comments, but I don't want to put LJ under even more pressure right now. There are a lot of people predicting that this could be the end of LJ. That may be a bit premature, but if the LJ guys can't get this fixed soon then they may find that a lot of their regular users migrate anyway.

Why do I keep trying to add an 'e' to every word that I pluralise? What is up with that?

Anyway, I've been reading around DWs network thing and found all sorts of interesting things. People that I didn't know had gone to DW, new-to-me-people, the LOLcat RSS feed...

I feel all excited about fannish-ness again.

I just have to be careful about all the spoilers out there. You know the ones. The ones for That Show. I don't want to know. I am hiding in my bunker of non-spoiler-ness. It's a comfy bunker.

At some stage today, because it is sunny and lovely, I shall walk down to my mailbox and pick up my mail. This has nothing to do with checking to see whether medieval Sims is here. Obviously.

In the same vein, I totally did not go onto AbeBooks yesterday and order second-hand copies of Archer's Goon and Logopolis. Nu-uh. It's some other book addict that you're looking for.

So for anyone on my f-list who managed to miss it, apparently LJ has been taken over by a new company.

Hmmm.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet. The transfer to Six Apart was announced with equal enthusiasm, but there have definitely been a few problems with it, not least the problems you get when a corporation would actually prefer to pimp their own products rather than develop the new acquisition. I can only assume that LJ didn't fit in with what they'd planned (perhaps we're to ornary and difficult to buy into the 6A philosphy? Go us!). The departure of Brad earlier in the year definitely hinted that it wasn't working out with 6A.

So transferring to an LJ-only company does have promise. The presence of and Advisory Board including elected representatived from the LJ community could be a way of addressing recent communication issues. I find it encouraging that Brad has already agreed to be a member of that Board - it indicates that he might have a bit of faith in the new plan. There are also promises to improve performance and add some of the features that users have been asking for, so we'll see how that goes.

I am not going to do a Chicken Licken thing on this (although I'm sure there are plenty out there already doing it) so I'll just wait and see how the next 100 days go. Should be interesting, anyway!

In other news, my insurer has finally recouped the money from the third party in my accident from 12th March. Yes, it is December now. And the delay was caused by my insurer...being unable to find the invoice for the money they paid the garage for the repairs. Good going.

Unfortunately, they forgot to request a refund on my excess. I have called and blasted them. I now have to send them a copy of the invoice from the garage. Apparently they had a note on the system to say that liability had been established so excess did not need to be paid. Um, unfortunately this note was put on *after* I had the repairs done and paid the garage. The fact that I noted that I wanted my excess repaid in my 20+ phone calls and three letters apparently didn't penetrate. And they wanted to know why I changed insurers? Bleh.

I've been reading the posts to do with the FanLib debate, the LJ deletions and the other stuff that erupted over the last couple of weeks. No comments to make apart from the fact that I'm not moving from LJ unless fandom at large decamps and the FanLib project looks rather like a crappier FF.net out for profit. Yay.

I am rather intrigued by the potential outcomes of the fanarchive project.

And I have registered at fandom_counts - I had no idea there were so many of us out here! And considering that's probably only a proportion (you never get full participation in any of these things), it's even more impressive. Over 31K of us the last time I checked.

In books things, trying to read Mansfield Park while oogy is not a great plan. I've switched to Sense and Sensibility. Much less likely to hurt my poor hurty head. If I get stuck with that then I'll be retreating to nice, comforting Chalet School stuff.

In fic things, I read a comment a few days ago about Winifred Bambera and got hit by a plot bunny. Having rewatched Battlefield to be sure of my canon, I am now proceeding. Why is my first DW fic going to be about a minor character from the classic series?

Now I must re-introduce my stomach to normal food and start getting better properly.

Thanks to a post at torch_wood, I found out that LJ has now enabled syndicated feeds based on a journal's tags, which is very nice. This means that people reading this journal could just get an RSS feed of entries tagged as Haven updates and nothing else, or get all the Doctor Who and Torchwood commentary but none of the other crap I tend to spout :-)

I put some potentially useful feeds in my profile: http://selenay936.livejournal.com/profile

Today is mostly about re-writing code with changes to make caculations more accurate. Fun! I love being a geek :-)

There has been no snow today, which is slightly disappointing :-(

A collegue has been asking about conventions, seeing as I'm booked out for two next month. Peg 2 is relatively easy to explain, but he's not quite getting the concept of Redemption. Somehow, panels and workshops and opportunities to be silly aren't really working for him. He isn't quite sure what the point, or the end result, will be. Hmmm. Not the kind of chap who does things because they're enjoyable, possibly. He's rather more interested in how much they make...

Speaking of Peg 2, it appears that David Nykl is going to be there. He was very good at SG-10, so this is a definite good thing :-) Apparently there will also be two Fandemonium authors there, which might be interesting.

Um, ow? Apparently my back doesn't appreciate foggy mornings. Or hot humid days, such as yesterday. So it's an ow day. And I'm very tired because it was far too hot last night so I didn't sleep.

What happened to my gorgeous cool, rainy autumn weather, people? Why has September suddenly turned into a re-run of July? I demand a refund on my month! I put up with July and autumn is my reward. Except autumn has disappeared :-(

Still, at least I'll be in Canada in four weeks :-)

Today I shall mostly be finishing off my usual reports while trying not to fall asleep or whine at anyone. I feel that chocolate may be required to get through the day. Really good, dark chocolate. And hey, I have a bar of that in my desk drawer :-)

Just had a look at LJ's new tracking options. They're either going to be very useful (when I want to keep up with the comments on an interesting debate in someone else's journal and know that I'll forget to re-check the post) or scary (when someone starts with the stalking). I am divided. And brain foggy.