We're going to keep this short and sweet (Frank and birthday vgifts will be back next week). You've probably seen the updates to our main menu. Don't be alarmed. You'll find everything you need, just in slightly shifted format. Just so you know, we based these changes on input from both experienced and new users who were not familiar with LiveJournal. Our goal was to reduce barriers to usability and make LiveJournal more accessible and easy to navigate. Please note that this is a work in progress. We welcome your detailed suggestions in feedback. We thank you, in advance, for helping us improve your LiveJournal experience.

We've updated the global navigation menu:

Here's a quick breakdown of what you'll find where:

• Scrapbook can now be found under Profile (thanks for your feedback, btw), along with Settings, Stats, and Edit Profile.
• You'll find all the tools you need to post and update entries under Journal, which includes posting and editing entries, managing comments and tags, and customizing your journal's style.
• Friends contains all of your friend settings, from filtering your Friends page to adding, removing, and finding new and existing friends on LiveJournal.
• Under Communities, you'll find links to manage your communities, accept community invites, and create new communities.
• Explore includes search features, RSS feeds, Question of the Day, and FRNK radio.
• Under Shop, you'll find links to upgrade or give a paid account, buy virtual gifts, purchase LiveJournal merchandise (like T-shirts), and view your payment history.

LiveJournal Mobile update:

We've enhanced LiveJournal's mobile site to improve usability and load times. We've made more of LiveJournal's features accessible via mobile, including posting comments, uploading photos, reading and commenting on friends' posts, finding and messaging friends, and more. We look forward to reviewing your feedback and recommendations for future improvements.

Other important changes:

• You can lock comments to prevent further commenting on a post, while leaving existing comments visible.
• We replaced the "Tell a friend" link with a new "Share This" widget that lets you share LiveJournal posts on other social media sites, including Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc.
• We changed some of the icons on entries (you can hover over the icons to view descriptions).
• You'll see a Tag count on your Tag management page.
• You'll now see the 10 most recent vgifts on your profile page. To remove vgifts, left-click on the vgift and choose whether you want to remove the vgift from your profile or delete it entirely.
• We've added options to help you control receipt of vgifts, which you'll find in My Stuff under Edit Profile. You can now enable vgifts from friends or everyone and disable anonymous vgifts.

We've got your fix:

• UPDATE: Rolling several updates into one listing here -- 1) Scrapbook should be back and working again. 2) The problem with the Update Journal page in IE6 and IE7 should be fixed now. 3) The problem with the userpic add-on package pricing has been fixed and refunds issued to anyone who was overcharged while the erroneous prices were in place.
• Non-conforming images will now be automatically resized for custom mood themes.
• Line breaks no longer count as two characters against your entry's character limit.
• We fixed a bug on the Manage Tags page so you can clear all tags and add new tags.
• We corrected the UI for the update.bml page so it displays properly in IE8.

Thanks again for joining us. Frank and company will be back next week!

wordy_icons
Searching for words to the wise? Come celebrate the joy of witty userpics in this creative, sharing community. A great place to strut your stuff or hunt down the perfect turn of phrase to complement your mood du jour. If you love the art of snark, you'll find inspiration, admiration, and entertaining jubilation.

corrupted_wish
Ever dream you'd find a genie in a bottle to grant your fondest wish? Granted!! Simply post your ardent desire and an alternative reality will materialize before your weary eyes. Quirky, creative, and oddly cathartic, a place where fantasies come true, but never in quite the manner you imagined. Shooting star meets Murphy's Law.

cookingfailures
Whether you're a wizard or a passionate novice in the kitchen, we've all had our share of recipe disasters. From the fallen souffle to the runny chocolate mousse to the lasagna that looks (and/or tastes) like it's been eaten before, come embrace your epic fails through photos and stories. Help others learn from your cooking calamities or simply revel in the fun of failure.

I woke up early today. Early, at least, for the weekend and definitely early for having lost an hour. I contemplated going back to sleep but decided to get out of bed. I figure that it'll be easier to go to bed early this way so that I can get up early tomorrow. And what's so important about tomorrow, you ask? Nothing. Wednesday, however, I have to be out of the house by 6:00 AM and my sleep schedule has skewed towards the late this spring break. So, anyway, I got up, did a few things here at home and headed off to a coffee house for three hours.

I've got a conference this week and feel so damn behind on everything. I've also feeling the deadline on a visceral level, both finishing the presentation and getting my classes in order since I won't be around most of the week, but it's not overwhelming, let alone sending me off to hide somewhere. There's another sign of improvement for you. Such milestones seem so very pathetic but at the same time they're real signs of real improvement. Something to celebrate.

The big problem with the conference is that I'll be missing the very first meeting of my accelerated 1 night/week course. With classes after 5:00 PM canceled on Holy Thursday, we're already one class down. The department chair is going to take my class, but it's the first class. I sent out the syllabus and grading contract a few weeks ago and asked them to email me any questions, and this week's session will involve some in-class activities designed to lead into their first assignment. I'm also going to record two short videos for the chair to show. One will be a short welcome to the class covering a few things not in the syllabus, along with posing the central question around which the course is themed: how might digital technologies and new media change our conception of composition and academic work? The other video will be some comments on their first project, which they'll start in class Thursday.

The conference presentation wouldn't be all that big of a deal, but I want to include a good slide show with it. One of the other two panelists does good slide show talks and we are in one of the few lcd projector w/ screen rooms. Mine's a visual friendly presentation so having slides is appropriate. Doing it well, though, does take thought and time.

Oh, the title of today's post. Since I did get up earlier than expected, I was up before the sun. At first I thought to myself, it can't be 7:00 AM. It's dark out, but then I realized Weekend Edition Sunday was playing. It was a foggy morning and the day has been a bit drizzly and entirely overcast, so it's been a sunless day.

Headline to news story: "Female driver shaving genitals causes accident in Florida."

You'd think headline would have covered the most insane part of this story, right? Right?

Not even close. Her ex-husband was controlling the wheel from the passenger's seat. And why was she engaged in self-grooming? Because she was going to meet her boyfriend. This raises so many questions with why the fuck didn't they switch seats the least of them.

We're finishing up a few odds and ends before our next major release. Our mighty Ops guys continue to slay spambots and balance load times on a highwire without a safety net (which is kind of tough dressed in full ninja gear). Down on solid ground, we're celebrating this week's virtual birthday party with a warm toast to pants. If you can rearrange the letters of your favorite city, state, and/or country (feel free to combine these elements) to spell one of Frank's favorite treats (e.g., pants, wire, paper, etc.), he'll send you over a can of whipped cream to top it all off (provided you return the empty can for his midnight snack)! And, with that, let the word scrambling commence!

Stuff you should know:

We're still working on the delayed/missing notifications issue. Sorry, we're frustrated too. We'll keep you posted. Last week, we became aware that a recently-implemented script was overwriting affiliate referral fees for some of our users. Once we confirmed this, our Ops team quickly removed the script. Please be aware that, while we may beta-test other affiliate scripts down the line, we will take greater measures to ensure that no existing user-referral arrangements are impacted in any way. While we plan to stick to a weekly news schedule, if we have a release in between regular newsletters, we'll post here to keep you informed. You can also check lj_releases for current release information.

To our paid users, we send squirrels in love!

If you have a paid or permanent account, you can send five free Squirrels in love vgifts through Monday, March 15th at 4pm, PST! You'll see both the free and the $0.99 squirrels displayed until they've scurried off to their new homes. Please send only one vgift at a time. In other words, you'll need to complete check-out and start a new order for each vgift you send. If you're not receiving vgifts (from friends and/or Frank), you may have disabled them. To enable vgifts, visit Edit profile (under Profile), scroll down to the bottom of the page, and select 'Do not disable' from the drop-down menu. Have fun!

Help is on the way!

We're pleased to announce the winner of our first charitable vgift poll, Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières, which provides critical medical care to under-served populations around the world. Priced at $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of the proceeds we raise from the sale of this vgift (we'll cover credit card fees). We invite you to start recommending nonprofits for our next fundraising drive at ljnewscontests. We'll take suggestions through the month and post a poll in the news during the first week of April to let you choose the recipient. We thank you, again, for your passion and generosity.

We've crowned a header

Congratulations to ohterlus for submitting the winning header, which will go live next week and keep us leafy through mid-April! You can submit designs for our next header contest at ljnewscontests now until March 31st. We'll post a poll in the news to let you decide which header will sit at the top of LiveJournal from mid-April to mid-May. All artistic interpretations are welcome. The winner will get a $25 LiveJournal gift certificate. All other contributors will receive $5 gift certificates. Our heartfelt appreciation for sharing your talent and creativity!

For this week's winning photo and more adventures with Frank & Meme, we'll catch you under the cut!

( Read more... )

I seem to have not mentioned that after meeting with the dean, my contract has been renewed again. When he told me I'd have the Jan. 15 deadline again, I told him I wanted September because I need to move on if I'm not done by then. He explained that the Jan. 15 deadline is for legal reasons, but that he'd include a memo in my file that we'd agreed I won't be renewed if I'm not done by Sept. 15. Overall, the meeting was good. Sometime before we met, he told my chair and me that he wanted us to discuss where I was at and what both the department and college could do to get me done. I do want to be here and it's nice to know that they believe I'm worth keeping despite the fact I should have been done 20 months ago.

I've been talked into signing up with Match.com, more to expand my social sphere than anything else, so I did. First day and I'm given my not yet ex-wife's profile. First off, she's so dolled up I didn't recognize her from her photos. And I last saw her three weeks ago. And, frankly, it didn't jump out at me as I read the profile either, but I started to get an uneasy feeling based on a few things. She says she prefers to go camping than fancy holidays, which left me baffled. We went camping once in our 19 years, about two years into the relationship. She did like it and raves to this day about the French toast I cooked, but I was never able to get her to go camping again and more than once she called my camping gear a waste of space. She considers the breakdown of our marriage my fault. That is, she doesn't recognize her own role in it whereas I understanding it as the result of unhealthy behaviors that became entrenched roles over a period of 19 years. (But then, I also suggested couple's counseling a few times during the relationship as well.) Anyways, I hardly recognize this woman from her profile but I'm willing to bet she'd easily recognize me from mine. Who knows. Maybe she's looking to reinvent herself while I'm just happy to reclaim myself.

I was enjoying reading some of the profiles but now I just feel creeped out. She'll see that I looked at her profile and she'll have no problem recognizing me from my picture (she took it) and that'll look like I was spying or something. And that doesn't even get into the whole issue that I couldn't recognize my own wife. If I'd had any doubts about the divorce, which I don't, this is a good sign that things were too far gone. I nearly killed myself over this? That disturbs me.

And now this online dating service feels like an icky, creepy place.