After agonizing over photos from my 1st wedding shoot I have sent them to the bride who cried, and the husband got a little misty eyed too. :) Here's one of my favourite shots.

givesushope
It's that glorious time of year when we reunite with loved ones (we neglected all year), stuff our faces to excess, and pass out in front of the TV. Perhaps a recalibration of the thanksometer is in order. A spin-off of the popular GivesMeHope.com site, this community invites you to document moments of kindness, generosity, and pure human love.

veggieslackers
Despite its mainstream appeal, Thanksgiving is not for everyone. There are those struggling with food disorders, for whom this day causes endless conflict. There are the cash-challenged, who can't afford the gluttony we've grown to expect. There are the lonely, who don't have loved ones nearby. And let's not forget the vegetarians, who decry the animal cruelty. But there's one more group we often overlook: the terminally lazy! This community of lazy vegetarians offers easy recipes for an animal-friendly feast.

fashin
Just in time for holiday shopping season, this fashionista community brings you the world of haute couture in the form of sumptuous photos, video clips, and candid commentary. There's also a sugary sprinkle of mainstream movie discussions and debates on such pressing social issues as manicure styles and celebrity colonics. If you need a break from the daily grind to indulge your girlie side, this is twinkly pink on steroids.

Dragged myself over the 20k line yesterday, then continued writing till I'd got 1700 words done.

Going through a slow bit in my novel, but will feel better when I get to 25k. :)

Reading a book right now Want to play? which would have been a great nano novel. XD It's a game about serial killers with 20 murders in it, and a real serial killer is imitating the game. I mean, 20 murders? XD Such possibilities. ;)

Got my first uni assignment! Doesn't look too hard! Really want to start working on it, but got way too much to do re: hw and nano. XD Will try to though.

Wrote 500words today, hope to get to 1700 at the very least!

Take care everyone. xxx

Ps: Cool quote of the day - "Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so": Bertrand Russell

Немного жарких эмоций в преддверии наступающих холодов :)
Надеюсь, эта серия вас согреет и вызовет только позитивные эмоции!

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
3. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
4. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
5. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Таня и Леша


Смотреть слайд-шоу

Контакты:
E-mail: ah-yh@mail.ru
ICQ: 594528115

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Дима и Света


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This is Turk:

He was clean shaven 10 days ago. He's participating in Movember. You can donate here, if you're so inclined.


In other self-promoting (kinda) news...

The end-of-year video that my school's year 12 kids made is available for viewing here... (Or, at least, it should be. It's stalling for me part way through, at the moment...)

www.manofart.com / Давид Федулов / 8(903) 255 4015 / manofart@gmai.com

 School stuff that needs getting done:
[x] Read intro to CS chap for next week
[x] Java hw
[x] Print and look at Math pp
[] Declarative hw
[] C++ hw
[] Db chappie to read
[x] Cache hw

Also:
[x] WRITE

Wrote 1400 yesterday and the day before... not behind cause I've got extra words, but anyways, this must stop!
So much work to do though!

Plot!

- Trial scenes (Tom's trial)
- Tom and Robert rescued by Phedea
- Try to get back to earth.
- Robert gets captured
- High chief reveals he has Matty.
- High chief convinces Robert to pretend he escaped to help them catch Tom. If he does HC will send Rob and Matty back to earth.
- Almost does it, but half heartedly, which results in him getting caught by Tom
- Robert, Phedea and Tom stay to try and save Matty
- Get caught by high chief
- Trial results in Tom's death sentence
- Rescue x2 (BY WHOM?? THE KIDS?), All go through portal, but do not manage to close it.
- Police go through portal/fairies come to to get Phedea and Tom. Chaos.
- Closing of portal, SOMEHOW.

Ending 1: Phedea in fairy world. People will probably like this ending best, and I hate unhappy endings in books, but 'happily ever after' stuff gets on my nerves when I try to write it.
Enbding 2: Phedea stays in the fairy world because she gets stuck there/for love of her fairy children. OR Phedea killed bu husband. Would be very in character for husband.