• It is thanks to easterbunny and aca that I know a large percentage of those I know in London. Last week, with one final full and friendly pub night, they took their leave of the city and the country for the other side of the Atlantic. It wasn't just farewell - it was also hello, to new and other interesting people they know, as well as established friends.


• C. and I joined eulistes and friends, temporarily over from Rome, for an expedition to eat Sunday roast (I had partridge and drank perry - how could I resist the combination?), visit the knights templar structure, Temple Church, and explore the "Renaissance Faces" exhibit at the National Gallery. The afternoon culminated with a very civilized trip to the Wolsey for afternoon tea/dinner.


• I paid Trent Park a visit. The long early morning sunshine was lovely on the green of the grass and the bare-limbed trees, and reflected off of the ponds.


• siusaidh passed through town for all of an hour or so. We met at Paul A. Young for chocolate buying, where a somewhat bemused shop assistant managed to miss the fact that we'd arranged to meet there because we'd both been before and wanted to return. Special flavors of the moment included Spiced Pumpkin; Toffee; and Wild Mushroom. I prolonged our brief reunion by accompanying her to Paddington before she left the country.


• marzapane is visiting!

In kitchen news, it is now fully functional! We have a hob and an extractor fan and they both work! And a lovely bit of concrete around the external gully! There's still some decorating work to do, but at this point, the work that's left is minor. Nearly there!

In four days I will be 27. Apart from a few white hairs in my stubble (gasp!) and occasionally on my head, I don't feel particularly old most of the time.

Unless I start talking to kids.

Of course, I'm back in college right now, which contributes to both sides of that argument. On the one hand I'm a student. I've missed this lifestyle, despite the inconveniences that come with it--namely homework, essays, and the massive stress. I'm doing exceptionally well, of course, with a 90+% average. I wish I'd had the discipline to do this the first time around. It's not that it's hard, it just takes commitment. 'Course I say that having already obtained a university degree; first year courses just feel like a breeze in comparison, and the confidence boost provided by the certainty that none of this is in any way beyond my abilities can't be understated.

At 27--hell, at 26--I find myself automatically considering the fresh high school graduates surrounding me "kids", of course. 19 year olds with no life experience outside of high school, very low work ethic, and none of the perspective granted by age and experience--hah! Listen to me. It doesn't hurt that opinion that since the time when I graduated, OAC has been removed and apparently the curriculum has been dumbed down a great deal.

The more I talk to the kids about the hobbies and interests we share, though--and I've made a few friends with similar hobbies and interests--the more I feel like an ageing hippie. Talking to kids about anime? They have no idea about the history of things, where it came from and why moe pisses me off so much. Of course they never had to defend the hobby against people saying "Anime? Oh, isn't that those Japanese porno cartoons?" because my generation did it. We made it accepted and the kids today have no sense of appreciation!

Talking about D&D? Oh, the kids will complain about the change to fourth edition. And some of the older people, too. But then, you ask a lot of the older players, the ones who are complaining about how fourth edition is a money grab and they've been playing since first edition and blah blah BLAH, and they'll tell you their preferred edition is 3.5. Hint: if 3.5 is your preferred edition, you automatically lose all right to complain that they're putting out another new edition. If you've been playing since AD&D came out and that's still the version you find the most fun with, great, more power to you, but I remember the same arguments coming out when it switched from AD&D to 3.0, and it's the SAME PEOPLE COMPLAINING NOW.

So, while I don't feel old, really, I do feel like I've got more experience, more perspective to offer than the callow youths I deal with. There're plenty of mature students in the program I'm in, too, of course, and that makes it easier. Not all the "kids" are bad, even.

Still, five days. I'm more than halfway through my third decade, and almost to the three quarter mark.

I think part of why I still feel youthful is that I haven't let life change me. I've got more perspective, I am more responsible, sure, but I haven't decided that my existing hobbies and interests are "childish" and abandoned them. I've been moving away from the more immature incarnations of some of the things I take interest in, certainly--I very rarely sit through anime unless it's specifically aimed at people my age; shounen is not sufficient to hold my interest. I don't play video games the way I used to--jrpgs require far too much of a time investment and I've very little inclination to spend any more on games I will never finish than I already have.

I dunno.

EDIT: 4:50PM Scrapbook (aka pics.livejournal.com) is back up! Thank you.

---------------

Sorry guys for the late notice! We've had to bring down the ScrapBook databases for some emergency maintenance. This means pics in your LiveJournal gallery are going to be unavailable. They should be back up within the next hour. I'll update this post when they're back online and we've checked them out.

bt

EDIT@6:54PM PST

We just implemented a temporary fix for our internal network and it *looks* promising. We'll let it bake in overnight and see how well it performs tonight and tomorrow.

------

Hi hi!

We've completed the majority of the move and had the site back up by 20:00 UTC (hey, look, I can post! You can read! Yay!) , but there's still some lingering issues that we need to clean up and are aware of so please be a little more patient while we wrap up the odds and ends.

I want to echo the lj_releases post where we thank burr86 and dormando for their ceaseless efforts, skill and knowledge. The LJ Ops and Engineering teams have/are *still* working their butts off but without burr86 and dormando's expertise, we could not have pulled this off.

For you techies, the slowness on our website is known, and the issue is currently isolated to oversubscribed ports on our core switches. That's direct from our vendor. Yeah, I know... Anyways, we're trying to implement a temporary workaround and we'll be looking to upgrade our hardware as a permanent solution. Please, hang in there a little longer!

bt

Greater London is very large. It can take a few hours to go somewhere within it. It is bigger than many countries are.

It is 1,579 km². If it were a country, it would be the world's 181st largest country in area. Okay, so it's larger only than very small countries. But still.

I really think of Greater London as being everything within the M25, which is a slightly larger area than that actually covered by the boroughs of Greater London. But while I can find the M25's length easily enough, I give up, for now, on finding the exact area it encompasses.

lion_lamb
Can a movie based on a novel ever be as good as the book? That's the big question for Twilight fans this week, and a sure topic of discussion on this community devoted to all things Bella and Edward.

geocaching
Have a hankering for a high-tech treasure hunt? After you take your GPS for a walk in the woods in search of the latest geocache (i.e. hidden container), you can share your find, get tech tips, and discuss the sport at this geocaching community.

topmodel
Have we really reached the end of another ANTM cycle? The finalist of Cycle 11 is announced on Wednesday, so expect some fierce discussion and model partisanship at this top Top Model community.

It's Monday, which means that Catena updated.

As far as I can tell, Belle is the only one who owns a car - and is possibly the only one sane enough drive.

That in itself should be scary.

--

Welcome to a Very Special Edition of LJ News.

Moving Day and What It Means for You

Moving What Where?

The long-awaited server move takes place this Tuesday, November 18, at 8:00 a.m. PST. We're moving the site from servers based in San Francisco to the servers in our new data center in Montana. A massive data move like this takes a lot of heavy lifting, and to haul all that data from San Francisco to Montana, we have to take the site down, starting at 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning. We don't think the move will take more than four hours, but there's always the possibility that it could take longer (the best laid plans and all).

What Does This Mean for You?

During the downtime, nothing on LJ will be available—no posting, no Friends page, no LJ mail, nada. When we bring the site back up, we're going to ease into it rather than open up a floodgate of traffic. Posting might not be immediately available or the site could be slow to load for a while.

New servers mean new IP addresses, so it's possible that LJ mail might not reach your email inbox because your email provider or client doesn't recognize the new IP addresses. We're working with email providers to whitelist the new IPs. There are a few things you can do on your end:

• Add these two IP addresses to your "allowed senders" list (or whitelist) and address book in your email client: 208.93.0.18 and 208.93.0.50. These are the new IPs for sending comments notifications and LJ mail to your email inbox.


• Add lj_notify@livejournal.com and webmaster@livejournal.com to your email address book.

If you can't edit the spam or junk filters in your email client, you may need to disable them entirely. Make these changes just before 8:00 a.m. PST on Tuesday morning or shortly after the site comes back up to ensure that your LJ mail makes it to your inbox.

Those of you who use domain aliasing to forward your domain to your LiveJournal will need to create a CNAME record that maps to livejournal.com. Please note that we're no longer supporting the A record. For more information, check the domain forwarding FAQ.

Before the move, you can check lj_maintenance for complete details about the planned downtime. During the move, you can check status.livejournal.org for updates about the site's status.

Permanent Account Sale Delayed

We regret to inform you that due to the server move, the Permanent Account sale has been pushed back to December 4, rather than November 20 as announced in the last news post. After the virtual dust has settled from the move, we'll be able to turn our attention to the Permanent Account sale. Except for the start date, the details remain the same: You have a limited opportunity to purchase LJ for life for only $175. It's a bummer to delay the sale, but on the bright side, you have more time to save up.

But What About A La Carte Userpics?

We know we promised more information about a la carte userpics, and we're sorry that details have not been forthcoming (blame it on the move). We're still planning on having a la carte userpics, but we don’t have any details yet. When the move is over, we'll have more information. We're sorry for the delay.

Yeah! Excellent shot! Good morning!

Last weekend, catsfire and I spent the day at the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair.
We just started our wanderings and were handed a free bag of carrots and potatoes!

Anyway, here are some pics!
( Trigger-happy skwerl is trigger-happy. Possibly too many pics under the cut! )

We also did some wine tastings and a ice cider tasting, sampled ostrich, honeys, cookies, prociutto, golden kiwis, roasted soybeans, fruit snacks...um...other stuff.... Yeah. tons of things to do. Last day is tomorrow so, if anyone wants to go..go!

We're pulling the plug! And putting it back in a different location! Ok, that was bad.

Seriously though, our data center move -- from San Francisco to Montana -- is scheduled for THIS TUESDAY, November 18, 2008 at 16:00 UTC (this equates to 8AM Pacific timezone) and will last for 4 hours. Unfortunately it'll be total downtime for all our sites and services -- no posting, no reading, no email.

Another news announcement will be posted on Monday November 17, including links to updated FAQs that you'll want to check out before the move.

As always, status.livejournal.org will have any updates during the move so bookmark it and check it out for the latest news.

All of us at LiveJournal have been eagerly looking forward to this move and I want to thank you for your patience and understanding as we put the finishing touches on something that will allow us to bring you an even better product in the future.
Though for us in the Ops and Engineering teams, we'll be REALLY happy if, on Tuesday, everything just works the same way it did on Monday.  Heh.

bt

The ENO put on a silly production of a ridiculous opera, and it was so much fun. We laughed a lot. Handel was an immensely prolific opera writer; sure, he did a certain amount of recycling among all his productions, but the music - and the cast's ability to perform it - was glorious nevertheless.

Partenope's setting is the court of the titular queen, where all present at the court (mostly princes of other places) are in love with her. She's a flirtatious woman, but has fallen in love crush with Arsace. The plot is that a man, Eurimene, who has "lost" all his papers and luggage, comes to court pretending to be one of Partenope's suitors. In reality, he's the cross-dressing Rosmira, Arsace's first love, whom he ficklely gave up to pursue Partenope. Wacky hijinks ensure.

( Doing the Charleston, 1730s style... )

I would recommend you go see it, but I saw the last of the ENO's six productions for the year, so you're out of luck.

( Cast and crew... )

Liverpool Street Station, 3:15 pm, today.

A salesman selling his wares, medicines to cure every ill. My favorite? A potion for "Bad Singing". The guy on the right on the stage is demonstrating the efficacy of a memory potion. The Pfizer-sponsored production was a delightful way of raising awareness of the dangers of buying drugs from non-pharmacy and non-doctor sources, including handing out fliers in the shape of the quack medicine bottles.

The message could have been a little more pointed though. Two girls asked me, "Is he for real?" in response to his sales pitch. I explained.

For once, I've posted a photo that, by clicking on it, leads to a somewhat larger version.

If you don't follow printperson's journal, she posted a drawing she made of the S. Martino cookie. (The heart-shaped part under the horse's belly was loose - that's why it's not in the same place in her drawing as in my photograph.)

Well since the last entry much has occurred. I should have mentioned last time that I went to see the play Goodbye Piccadilly, a rather nice production about death in the family. It was part of my family and friends monthly subscription.

( The Hills are Alive )

Oh and apparently there was an election in the United States, you may have heard of it.

Reminder...



THIS WEEK:
Miami, Florida:
The Miami Book Fair

Wednesday night, I'll be participating in a tribute panel to Will Eisner and then on Saturday afternoon, I'll be presenting a lecture on comics trends.

Check out the Comix Galaxy listings here:



See you there!

Today is Saint Martin's Day, a day of a soldier's sacrifice, although a rather different one than those commemorated by Armistice Day. Martin was a Roman soldier from Hungary, who, pitying a roadside beggar near Amiens, cut his cloak into two pieces with his sword and gave the beggar one of them. Later, he realized in a vision that he had given his (half) cloak to Christ, and converted to Christianity.

Traditionally, in many parts of Europe, this is the beginning of winter. It's a feast day in preparation of a pre-Christmas fasting period, a day for celebrating the harvest, eating goose, and drinking wine.

The Venetian tradition is to buy and eat cookies in the shape of Saint Martin - San Martino. This is one. My parents brought it to me this past week as a seasonal gift. Can you make out the Roman soldier with helmet on horseback underneath all that frosting and candy?

nanowrimo
Week two of National Novel Writing Month is upon us. What better way to rally your word count than with some wise plot advice or an invigorating round of NaNo sprints over at this very wordy community?