The Packbats' Weblog

You know that Writer's Block from last year, "What piece of advice do you wish you could take?" I noticed it was tagged with the tag, "take my advice", and I realized that I had other advice to give.

Some of it is tagged, now, if you're curious.

Laters!

I don't know how many of you have been following the LJ Advisory Board elections (lj_election_en), but here's my preferred slate: tango, sollitaire, and lordandrei. From what I know (including my brother's slight personal acquaintance with tango) these three seem to be the best qualified to work with Livejournal for improvement and most knowledgeable about the problems the advisory board may face. In any case, the election voting closes Thursday at 9 p.m. PDT.

Carry on.

Who Wants to Be a Superhero, tomorrow, 9/8c!

Also, if you had a paid account during the power outage a few days ago, click here for three more days.


Oh, and I actually do have something to talk about! You know music? I've been noticing more and more that my opinions of songs tend to change when I listen to them a lot.

What do I mean? Well, let's take a few examples: Smash Mouth's "All Star", Donovan's "Mellow Yellow", Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock", Suzanne Vega's "Fat Man & Dancing Girl".

I love the movie "Mystery Men". When "All Star" played in the ending credits, I thought it rocked - clever lyrics, a distinctive style, a good beat ... a real five-star song in my own personal rating system. And when I saw my brother had a tape with the song on it, I was so enthusiastic about it that he gave me a copy of the CD (bought on the cheap, but hey, it's good!).

And the whole CD sounds like "All Star", with that 'distincive style'. And the whole CD is mediocre. And listening to "All Star" now, it seems kinda cheesy. I've gone from being excited by it to, well, liking it in small doses, sometimes, if it's played by itself.

Now that I think of it, "Mellow Yellow" is the same but more so. I've gone from loving to hating that song, simple as that.

Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock", on the other hand, I started to like. And "Fat Man & Dancing Girl". Both of them sounded flat-out weird when I first heard them, like "two-star skip-it-if-you-feel-like-it" lame, but they're interesting to me now. Songs I might choose out to listen to.

I don't know if there's a pattern to it. But it's worth noting that "Fat Man & Dancing Girl" is one of the two tracks which reviewers rave about on "99.9 F°". So maybe that means something.

Is it just me, or are posts vanishing?

I'll check news et al. in a minute, but this is weird.

Edit: Nothing in news, nothing in lj_maintenance, nothing in status. Curiouser and curiouser....

I was looking at my journal, and I finally decided to start fiddling with the color scheme. Looks pretty decent, doesn't it?

( The exact changes )

I like it. It seems to work.

Alright! I've marked every one of my posts with numerous tags, so now they're easier to browse!

97 posts, eh? Cool. And, not surprisingly, the biggest category was personal history, which I used as a blanket category for anything that was just an update on me. Second place was geekery, again, not surprising.

So, cool. I wonder how one gets to view the list of tags on others' journals?

http://www.livejournal.com/random.bml!

What I learned from this:

• The stereotypes about LJ are true.
  
• Most LJers post quite infrequently.
  
• A lot of LJers don't speak English.
  
• Someone has an LJ with only 2 posts containing only six words (including subject lines), and it got five times as many comments as mine.
  
• The other stereotypes about LJ are also true.
  
• "This journal has been deleted and purged." actually sounds kinda cool.
  
• There are an lot of really bad layouts, but they aren't the majority.
  
• Scratch that, they are the majority. Some of these are just painfully bad. Ultra-narrow columns? Inconsistent borders? Moronic color schemes? What's next, annoying Flash anims?
  
• Oh, marquees. I forgot the marquees. And the animated gifs.
  
• Ah, sweet irony. Someone hotlinked their background pic, and it says "Remote Linking Forbidden".
  
• Wow. A newsfeed with no articles. Funky!
  
• How many LJ accounts are there? 7.3 million? Then how did I randomly get the same one twice?
  
• No way. I actually found an interesting journal purely randomly. And it only took an hour or so of clicking. I'm gonna bookmark it.
  
• And ... back to the stupid. Black on black color scheme? Are they trying to look like idiots?
  
• Another repeat. At this point, I'm guessing that the Random feature is busted. I think I'll end the test here.

Right. Something's very wrong here; according to my calculations, there's less than one chance in a million of getting two repeat hits like this. I wonder if the LJ support people know?

Oh well. At least I found agrumer. I wonder if he'll mind my linking him?

Ooh, his Pigs and Fishes page looks interesting...

I was just browsing the FAQs, trying to find info on having multiple LJ accounts, when I stumbled upon FAQ Question #167, about the server clusters upon which the accounts are stored. Naturally, I immediately followed the link to learn which server cluster I was on.

Apparently, "packbat is on Soybean."

Somehow, I find the idea of naming a server after a vegetable quite endearing. I wonder what the other ones are called.