"You're one of the most insightful people I know."

A friend said that to me once, and she doesn't know it, but it permanently changed the way I see myself. Mostly because I hold her in great respect and love. I do now as much as I have before, though we've drifted apart.

"Nothing ever lasts."

Truer words have never been spoken. I've thought a lot about life recently. I always think about love, though I whine about it less these days. It's simple, really. I've made the choice to focus my life on other things. More pertinent, evident things. Things like life, and how I'm living it. The choices I'm making.

Choices. You know, my friends, that our lives are built of the choices we make. Sure, there are coincidences. Is Fate a player? Maybe. But the body and soul of our lives are constructed of the choices we make, and the ripples those choices cause. The Butterfly Effect, if you will. But, without Ashton Kutcher.

These choices affect the people we are, the people around us, the people around them, and so forth. We make what we will of our lives by the choices we make every day. "Do I get up and go to work today, or do I not?" "Do I better myself today? Or do I not?" "Do I scratch myself right now, or do I not?" We've seen this concept before. We all understand what I'm talking about. But what if I told you that this is what it's all about? That the meaning of life is not some simple phrase, not some foolish hope, but is threaded and woven into the pattern of choices we make?

I felt old today. I'm only 29, but I realized that I have lived 30 years not doing a whole hell of a lot. I thought closely about it for some time. I thought about love, myself, and my surroundings. I thought about my life. I realized that I have made some awful, some stupid and some fantastic decisions. I realized that for much of it, I didn't know any better. I realized that I now do, and I still make bad decisions every day. Lazy decisions, cruel decisions, apathetic decisions. I shed the emptiness and replaced it with uncertainty a long time ago. I've grown familiar and comfortable with that uncertainty, I've poked at it some and, like a mass of granite in the middle of the artist's studio, I stare at it every day and wait for inspiration to strike so I can create my masterpiece. But instead of lamenting the absence of a muse, I celebrate the wonderful things in my life. My friends, my plans, and my dreams. Not me yet, I'm not there yet. Not wonderful.

But I'm getting there.

I love you, my older sister, and I worry and care and marvel at you from where I am now. I'm sad I didn't get a picture of the Prince in the mail, but I'm sure you have your reasons, and I trust you.

Someday soon, I would like to look you in the face and tell you that I didn't mean it, but you know that. Someday I hope you find it in your heart to forgive the breaking of your fragile trust. Another product of bad decisions. Someday soon I hope you find the happiness you don't believe exists for you anymore.

Someday soon, I hope you shine again, as you once did.

But no matter what, I'll always love you, and if you need me, I'll be there.

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. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. 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)!
5. 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
6. 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!

( Read more... )

Curtains

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

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.

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.