Friends

**FINAL EDIT Thu Dec 10 02:15:47 UTC 2009**

So there is the final update... Over the past day we have processed around 11 million jobs out of the 12 million that were in queue at that time. Please bear in mind that over this past day, more jobs for notifications are also created. So while the queue has been dropping, we are still not fully caught up at this point, due to backlog and new jobs. We have roughly 3 million jobs still pending that involve the notification system in some manner. We had hoped we could have fully cleared the queue in a day, but unfortunately we can't clear it too quickly, since we need the rest of the site to operate normally. From our current perspective on the amount of jobs that are left in queue, and how many it has processed thus far, we believe it will take around another 8 - 12 hours to process everything.

And finally some answers to some questions:

( Read More and Get Some Answers... )

Current Location: Under a Rock
Current Mood: grumpy

Q: What is the plural of Elvis?

A: Costellos. There is only one King.

LiveJournal: The First Decade

Just in time for holiday shopping, we're thrilled to announce the release of our ten-year anniversary anthology. Published by Blurb.com, the book showcases a decade of extraordinary talent drawn from LiveJournal users around the world. This must-read compilation features stories, memes, photos, comics, editorials, graphic content, and more, including:

1. Excerpts from Oh No They Didn't (a/k/a ohnotheydidnt), the largest community on LiveJournal, covering celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture
2. A look at post-Katrina New Orleans from the journal of Poppy Z. Brite
3. Gripping narratives, including a poignant reverie on a blind date
4. Photography that spans the globe, ranging from old-fashioned Polaroids to underwater photography
5. Mouthwatering dishes from food_porn

What began as a late-night inspiration back in Brad Fitzpatrick's college dorm in 1999 has grown to encompass nearly 25 million users worldwide, with journals and communities covering every conceivable hobby, passion, and topic. To get your copy, please visit the Blurb Bookstore. For updates and entries from book contributors, please join lj_turns10.

Tweaks and enhancements

• You can now ban a user from all of your communities and journals at once. To access this feature, hover over the person's userpic and choose Ban user everywhere from the drop-down menu.
• Follow LiveJournal on Twitter!

Give a little to help a lot!

In honor of National AIDS Awareness month, we've added a new charitable vgift. For each red ribbon you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine (we'll cover credit card fees). You can read more about IAVI at lj_cares. While we're on the subject, we raised $740 from our November fundraiser for Love Without Boundaries, which supports emergency healthcare and adoption of Chinese orphans. We thank you for helping us help others.

Photos of the week

We're back with more incredible pictures from our super-talented LiveJournal photographers. Congratulations to ilya_gorokhov, who is the winner of our very first lj_photophile poll.

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay safe and snug out there!

**EDIT Thu Dec 3 23:24:15 UTC 2009 **

Hey Everyone, we are about to run the last alter job that we need to on our database servers. This will effect userpics / scrapbook / vgift images for the next few hours. Have no fear, your images aren't lost, there is just a really intensive process running on the servers which store the information for mogilefs. Thank you for your understanding and all the LJ love...

Hey LJers,

I just wanted to let you all know that we are going to be performing some mogilefs maintenance over the next few days. We will be upgrading our current version to latest stable as well as changing some db config information to better handle the amount of files we are currently hosting. This shouldn't cause a big impact on site stability, but you may see some minor delays with userpic / scrapbook images appearing or other requests associated with our mogilefs. We would love to not have that happen, but unfortunately with some of the steps we need to take we have to cause a delay with images. I figured this was a better solution than taking down all of LiveJournal because well lets face it, we all need our daily LJ fix ;)

Thanks,

Current Location: Jumping out of a perfectly good plane
Current Mood: dirty
Current Music: Bad Religion - Stranger Than Fiction

MuppetStudios is on a roll...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnT7pT6zCcA

Current Music: Ode To Joy

Can anyone loan me a chainsaw this weekend or next week?

nursewendybird and I are visiting her oldest daughter, Becky. We arrived last night in Poughkeepsie, NY, and those two then soon went out for groceries. We spent the evening preparing side dishes. This morning, Becky prepared the pan by soda-soaking off the chemicals used to preserve the copper bottom, and then she had the joyous duty of reaching inside the bird to remove the gizzard&c. (I got photos.) Later today, the youngest daughter, her boyfriend, nursewendybird's ex-husband (the father of all three of her girls) and her (Wendy's) sister Jill will arrive with their contributions to our holiday meal. This morning we had coffee and some wonderful donuts that my wife got from the Beltsville bakery next to Petco on Rte. 1 and that were still good, chocolate coated, nubbly with local character. Willow, Becky's rescue cat, will soon get to sample her first turkey innards. She's happy just anticipating this.

Spider-Man returns to the Macy's parade after a 10-year absence. (He missed his movie appearance!) This surprises me because this is the first time I've watched the parade in quite a few years. (Attribute it to sleeping late and just generally avoiding television.)

I've finished "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" and have moved on to "The Yiddish Policemen's Union." I'll be reading "Manhood for Amateurs" right after that -- let's just say I'm still on my Michael Chabon kick, eh? "Yiddish Policemen" is really fascinating so far, but has taken me a few chapters to genuinely get into. I'm glad I unknowingly did the background work already, having read something about Yiddish speech patterns, Chasidim and their societies, and other such things. It's a great help in understanding the whole stylistic tack Chabon takes with this alternate reality (present-day, with Israel having been dissolved in the late 1940s, along with Berlin being hit with the atomic bomb, and millions of Jews having migrated to the general area of Sitka, Alaska). Imagine a hard-boiled detective noir novel, but with as much "nu" as noir. Can't imagine it? Go out and get it, then. It's in the sale bins for only about eight bucks: well worth it for a quality 2007 genre-bending novel.

As for the "R&J" cast, we've received the traditional warning from the director to leave our drama at the door when we show up for rehearsal. Of course life is full of drama, some merely distracting, some sad to hear, always generating a lot of conversation. It's good to catch up, but it's also good to just get back to the work of turning Romeo and Juliet into the fascinating show it's going to be. I hope everyone out there, all my Rudes, friends and family, have a joyous day today and remember how much they have in their lives for which they can be truly thankful.