Dr. Phil's Dreamwidth Journal

As I've said before, this blog is as much for my own journal as it is to inform and have fun and rant with y'all. So this entry is definitely in the You May Not Notice Or Care About This.

Back in December 2011 I added a Dreamwidth blog to my LiveJournal blog. They're the same, actually. But I write in Dreamwidth and crosspost to LiveJournal, because DW is easier and doesn't burden me with crap. I then put a link to Facebook. Originally, I kept linking to LJ and not DW, because Facebook/Dreamwidth was very irregular about including either icons or pictures with the link. But then I realized that if you don't have a LiveJournal account and you're not logged in or have a cookie set, then LJ is rather nutty about putting up pop-ups begging you to join LJ. And since I hate having to deal with crap like that myself -- I didn't see it normally because I have a permanent LJ account -- I switched to putting the Facebook link with Dreamwidth.

Whew.

Bottom line, I had changed my links because it was nicer to you guys.

You may also have noticed that at the bottom of posts for a while, there has been the following block -- this one taken from the previous post:

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

This serves three purposes: (1) It's consistent with a lot of other blogs, which list WordPress or LiveJournal or Dreamwidth or their own blog. And identifies the original source. (2) If you came to the entry on say Dreamwidth and wanted to make a comment where you have an account on LiveJournal, it's easy. (3) It means I have both LJ and DW links available to me ***, for when I want to link to...

Say the previous post (DW).

HOWEVER...

Effective with the previous post (DW) (LJ), I have now officially reversed the order and specifically label both links as DW and LJ respectively.

On the first of April LiveJournal suggested that you Invite your friends back to LiveJournal!. That this attempt to regain some of their eyeballs they've lost over a number of bonehead moves and updates, especially since LiveJournal Release 88 (see icon above), ON THE FIRST OF APRIL, tells you why I choose to help my three readers by directing them first to the Dreamwidth post, but still give them the LiveJournal option.

For those of you on LiveJournal, most of my (very few) comments I get on posts come on LJ. Or Facebook. Only a few on DW. So I am on LiveJournal checking Recent Comments and Friends Page daily. Rest assured, that's not going to change.

Whichever is convenient for you, the dear reader. But I did want to mention the change.

That is all.

Dr. Phil

*** NOTE: There is a small window of time where I have to post a new entry to DW and the following fields don't have the link addresses in them yet, because the post number isn't assigned until it's posted... And then I have to update it. Got it? (grin)

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

An Amusing Meme Used Before

Which I got from Mary Robinette Kowalski in 2011:

This is one of my favorite memes. It’s a look at the last year, through the first line of my first blog post of each month.

The thing about LJ memes is that you don't always know where it'll take you, so I'm willing to give this another try. I modified this, giving the blog title and the first line(s) or paragraph(s). This is all cut-and-paste, typos and all. If you want to see the context or whole posts, or just the whole year, you can go to my 2014 LiveJournal page or 2014 Dreamwidth page.

Dr. Phil's First Lines of 2014

1 -- Happy -- I am home.

I am healthy.

I can walk.

I can stand.

2 -- Pay Attention! -- But I Worked Five Days

Long strange week. Monday was a snow day. Tuesday was half a snow day -- GVSU closed but WMU didn't. I guess that makes Monday three-quarters of a snow day, since WMU closed and GVSU closed at 2pm. Anyway, on Tuesday I declared it a Too Dangerous To Drive day. Lest you think that this made it a three day work week for us, Mrs. Dr. Phil busied herself by reviewing for a journal and other stuff for classes. I worked and even Skyped in my lecture on Tuesday.

3 -- The Long And Short -- Wavelengths, that is.

I've been meaning to do this for a long time. I have two sibling camera setups. The Nikon D100R (a D100 converted to infrared use) with a 28-80mm f3.5-5.6D (New) AF-NIKKOR and a regular D100 with a 28-80mm f3.3-5.6G AF-NIKKOR. And I wanted to shoot them essentially side-by-side or rather serially, so I can see the same image in visible and IR

4 -- Ah, Deadlines -- What's the quote? I love deadlines -- I love the sound they make whooshing by.

Nice of the Kindle Fire HD spellchecker to have "whooshing."

5 -- May Day May Day May Day -- It's the First of May. 2014. We've managed to get through an odd April, only to have May weather start out equally unsettled.

6 -- The News We Knew Would Come -- By now everyone has probably heard the news. Checked my Friends feed this morning on LJ and there was official news about Jay Lake and his long battle with cancer.

Jay passed this morning, June 1 at 5:45 (PDT). Lisa and friends were with him. He will be missed.

Jay Lake had many, many friends -- he was generous with his time. And thousands more who, like me, saw him at a few cons and voraciously read his daily blog posts. His Link Salad -- a term I stole for my Astronomy classes -- was a daily fixture. And several times items I came up with were linked by Jay.

7 -- HBO 20 -- Lost In Space -- The Matrix -- Twentieth session: Lost In Space (conclusion)
There is a semi-time travel motif to the third act of Lost In Space. And they even manage an Omega-13 do-over. The second act is a Don't Go Down Into The Basement movie. Hint: you have a giant robot and have found a strange ship which may be from the future with no people but the power is on. Send the damn robot.

Any signs of intelligence in the first act are pretty much gone by the third.

8 -- Please Release Me Let Go... I Don't Love You Anymore... -- As if there aren't enough reasons to hate phones and telemarketers, there's a new and disturbing issue that has been building for a couple of years... And getting worse.

9 -- The Dread Pirate Roberts Goes To College -- Most weekends we do movies on Saturday. But this is a three-day weekend -- the last three-day weekend of the year -- and the official end of summer. So with rain forecast as possible on Saturday and Monday, we decided to see what the options were for Sunday. There's the new Daniel Radcliffe movie, but at Celebration North it would be in the evening, otherwise we'd have to go to Rivertown. We've talked about seeing Guardians of the Galaxy again, but that's a low priority. In the end, there was one amazing movie to see. A little early, so we didn't finish the Sunday paper first, but a nice day for a drive.

10 -- Foreign Objects / Aliens / What The Hell...? II -- Huh. It happened again.

While up at Michigan Tech, there was a new bruise, area of bleeding, but on the back and side of the heel, not the bottom. Mrs. Dr. Phil had joked that maybe it was that other missing piece of hydraferra blue that went missing trying to get out. But really, we thought it was irritation of resting on the back of the heel in the AFO orthotic during twelve hours of driving.

11 -- A New Theory -- Thursday morning gas was $2.96.9/gallon for regular, $3.11.9/gal for midgrade. No coupon. (Sigh)

12 -- It's Official -- Sabbatical 2.0 -- I'm adjunct. I don't get sabbaticals, unless I want to declare one.

Statistics

Health -- 3
Teaching -- 2
Writing -- 2
Rants -- 2
Other Topics -- 3

Of course cherry picking just the first post of the month misses lots. But it's like posting the first lines of story -- you never know what you get. And it amuses me.

Dr. Phil

Posted on Dreamwidth
Crossposted on LiveJournal

Sigh. Snarl. Bitch.

Ten months after the debacle that was LiveJournal Release 88 -- what drove me to get a PAID Dreamwidth account, despite being an LJ Permanent Account holder -- they vomit up Release 98. Which includes a horrible beta test for a poorly redesigned Friends page that no one seems to want.

I am SO tired of people breaking software, breaking websites, failing to understand how users actually use the damned things. It's stupid and piss-poor business.

Epic fail.

Again.

Dr. Phil

So There I Was, Minding My Own Business

When LiveJournal decided to hork up Release 88 and annoy a whole lotta users -- and spent most of this week ignoring 20,000 comments.

This drove me to finally take a gander at Dreamwidth.

Import Successful

Apparently a lot of other LJ users thought so, too. Dreamwidth responded by putting new servers online to handle the load and post updates regarding the queue of LJ imports. Still, it took but 14 hours or so to get my place in the queue and so I have a duplicate of all my posts, comments and icons on my shiny new DW Paid Premium account.

Go me.

Is This The End?

I surely hope not.

And I'm stubborn enough to stick with LJ for the moment. I'll investigate crossposting,*** etc., but dammit, it's Christmas and I have a bunch of end of the year stuff that needs to be done and I resent LJ picking now to fuck up customer relations.

But I will be checking in here, so if you're on DW and need to friend, go right ahead.

Dr. Phil

*** - Well, the Crosspost This Entry checkbox is right there, might as well try this.

Welcome To Me

Ah, the Great LiveJournal Fail-To-Roll-Back-Release-88 Debacle brings another LJ user to explore Dreamwidth.

Work in progress for now.

Dr. Phil

Google Buzz Message

Huh. Just got a Google Buzz message on Gmail. You remember Google Buzz. It was supposed to be something like the Google version of Facebook? Or was it Twitter? See -- now I can't even remember. Maybe it was Facetwit.

I mention this because it is the 5th of April -- and the last Buzz message is dated January 30th. Does this mean that Google Buzz is really and truly dead now?

Not that I used it much, at least for initiating messages. I have LiveJournal, Facebook and a couple of closed message boards for that, along with Other People's Blogs. But I'd get a dozen or so messages a week, at least I did during 2010, and occasionally make a comment back. But really, only a handful of people ever seemed to use it.

Which Is Rather Remarkable In Itself

Facebook ain't perfect -- not by a long shot. But it has its billion users and I probably have linked to 100-150 people I know. So Facebook is convenient and it works, more or less. Now if they'd just leave well enough alone and not change how it operates every week -- and then not tell anyone about it! Aside: The one that really annoys me is that if you hit ENTER in a comment, you enter the comment, you don't get a carriage return/new line. For that you need to do Alt+Enter or something totally non-intuitively obvious. As in nobody types that way!

But Facebook is usable and Google, which has done so many things right in their endeavors, especially their search engine (Hell, Microsoft thinks it's good enough to power Bing.) and Gmail, has struck out at least twice now with FaceGoogled competitors.

There Is No Static Configuration Any More

Of course the rad new kids are no doubt using other things. And for all the twittering twits on Twitter, I don't have to use Twitter to get the feeds on Facebook or LiveJournal, so I get its benefits without its time suck. And whatever we all are using here in the 2011, in the future, like say 2016, we'll all be using something else which most of us aren't even aware about yet. (grin)

Or not. (double-grin)

Dr. Phil

I'm A Reasonable Person

I understand that some of my readers, including Mrs. Dr. Phil, don't have LiveJournal accounts or want to mess with using some of the alternative logins via Facebook, etc.

So I do allow Anonymous posting of comments. However, for obvious reasons I have Anonymous comments go straight into the moderation queue, which I usually check at least once or twice a day. In fact, I get notified about all comments to my blog.

However, For Those Of You Who Are Idiots

There are those of you around the whole who wish to abuse my LiveJournal blog, and I have zero tolerance for this. This includes:

(1) Anonymous trolls who want to use my posts to either foment controversy or somehow think they can change my mind with Stupid Troll comments or promote their own Personal Asshattery or want to annoy me.

(2) Anonymous spam bastards who want to use my posts, often one or two years old, to try to insert ads for their various drugs, sex videos, counterfeit clothing, probably diseased websites or web services, or other nefarious, illegal and/or disgusting activities. And I really get upset when you decide you can trash postings of mine that are rather important to me.

Please note that as a Permanent Account holder, I do not puts ads on my LiveJournal -- if you see ads when reading my blog it is because you aren't a logged in paid LJ user who can choose to not see ads. Further, the only commercial promotions that I allow on my LiveJournal blog are either my own writings or things that I find of value that I choose to promote. You, especially Anonymous yous, do not get to override my decisions.

If you fall into either of these Idiot classifications, do us both a favor and don't even bother to post spam or troll crap on my LJ. Because I will delete them, but I will also save copies of your crap and your URL. This also applies to postings which have LiveJournal account names -- these LJ users will be reported to LiveJournal for spam activity.

Sorry To Waste Everyone Else's Time With This

But in the last week I've had to scrub out my moderation queue with twelve items of disgusting spammy content -- some of them from the same people beating their stupid spammy heads against the same unmoving brick wall. It's a waste of my time and I'm sorry if any of this shows up temporarily from illegitimate LJ usernames.

To my friends and family and casual readers of my blog -- glad you're here and I try to reply to all your comments in due course. Thanks.

Dr. Phil

It's Been A Schizophrenic Weekend

Sunday was the actual Fourth of July. But of course there is the pressure for a weekend holiday to be observed on a Monday, so Independence Day (Observed) is the fifth. So the question becomes -- when do you have a parade, if you're going to have a parade? Sunday -- it's the actual 4th, but some of the local jurisdictions don't want to intrude on church. Monday -- it's the official day off, but a lot of people want to make that a play day. Saturday -- it's available, but it's a big consumer shopping day, so no one wants to hurt local businesses.

Compounding the schizophrenia has been the weather. Two weeks ago was hot, humid and full of dangerous summer storms, including even some small tornados. Last week, though, was dry, blue skies, light breezes and highs in the 70s and occasionally the low 80s. Friday got up to 86°F, Saturday was 88°F and Sunday at least 92°F. Sunday was also the return of the humidity and Monday will begin a return to some rain.

So given the expected crowded roads for people getting away, plus all those doing staycations at home or in the area, I suppose we can forgive those who started bugging out of work on Thursday or Friday -- both of those days had reduced traffic volumes for commuting in the Grand Rapids area, enough to be commented upon by the news people.

Gas Prices: Meh

I'd previously thought that 4th of July gas prices would be around $3.50.9/gal, but in mid-May they were saying not much more than $3/gal by mid-summer. Well, local regular gas this weekend has been $2.82.9/gal. My current theory is that the oil companies are all treading lightly while the BP oil well disaster in the Gulf is still unresolved.

Picnic!

It's a summer holiday, so once one has been solemn and respectful, it's time to eat. For us, the weekend has become a celebration of all things tube meat. (grin) Friday and Saturday we had some new Aidele's garlic and gruyere cheese sausages, with some potato salad Mrs. Dr. Phil threw together with some odds things we had on hand. Sunday we had "picnic" -- consisting of all sorts of things that had come on Friday in a Zingerman's deli gift box and things we had in the pantry. Liverwurst, a herb encrusted sausage, another salty sausage like a moist jerky, three cheeses, three kinds of olives, some tiny sour pickles, a tin of smoked mussels, and a lightly toasted hard bread. And Monday we have some natural casing hot dogs and German wieners from the local excellent Allendale Meat Market which we'll have with some baked beans. Yum.

Oh, and after a good several weeks of outstandingly lovely local strawberries, the strawberries are now gone from the local farm stands, but Mrs. Dr. Phil came back on Saturday with blueberries, raspberries, dark cherries and apricots -- all local West Michigan. Not a dud in the batch.

In observance of the day, Sunday's dessert was red, white & blue -- blueberry crisp topped with whipped cream and fresh raspberries. Yum. We like summer here.

A Minor Upgrade To This LiveJournal Blog

Since I have been adding LJ tags to all current entries for quite a while, and slowly doing retrospective updates of older entries, I've added a link over on the left side of my LJ page for jumping to the list of all my LJ tags. Frankly, I don't care if y'all make use of it -- tags are making it easier for me to find previous posts on things. (selfish grin) But, knock yourself out if you want to peruse older entries or look up reviews and things.

Back To Writing

Now if you excuse me, I have to dive back into a new short story I started this morning. These poor characters are going to find themselves shortly way out of their league. (evil writer's grin)

Dr. Phil

I Will Not Be Assimilated

Looked at my LJ's View Recent Comments page and found that some asshole targeted this blog for some thirteen comment spams over thirteen of my posts -- lots of links to geisha sluts and teen porn and other savory delights. (NOT) All dated some 7 hours ago. Banned her, marked her as spam, deleted all comments by her.

Go away!

My Apologies

To any of the few human beings who ever actually read my blog, I apologize if you actually ran into this crap.

Uptick

I've already seen three other cases of blog comment spam on other people's blogs in the last couple of days. LJ themselves said they had a new anti-spam system in place and had cleared out and banned a whole lot of shadow users. I guess they've had some effect -- almost all the other annoying suckass comment spam I've had this LJ came from Anonymous people, who I'd ensnared in the moderation queue and not let you be subject to this crap.

Mostly they've targeted one particular older posting, but not this time.

And my e-mail spam has greatly increased in the last two or three weeks. Wonderful.

Idiots. Useless stupid idiots. I guess you can guess that I am not impressed by this form of bad behavior. (grin)

You may resume your normal, more pleasant perusal of teh Internets. (sigh)

UPDATE: I had to go in and remove each of the thirteen instances. Fortunately, they were all done about the same time, but this is real Whack-a-Mole shit. Could get ugly. If I start moderating ALL comments, you'll know why.

Dr. Phil

Anniversaries in Internet Time

Thursday I got a notice that LiveJournal is 10 years old. So, was this news on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday? Nope, they noted that Facebook had turned 5 years old. Well isn't that special?

Actually, that LJ started in 1999 and Facebook in 2004 is kind of interesting. I'm not sure when I started running into LiveJournal entries while running web searches. But it was slithytove's reporting from the 2004 Clarion workshop -- I learned a lot about what was going on at Clarion and I was there and my room was across the hall from John's! -- that got me reading blogs and then in 2005 I started this LJ.

I avoided Facebook for the longest time, especially because you had to sign up to use it -- no, try it before you buy it. But then Mrs. Dr. Phil got involved and I decided to set up a Facebook group for my Physics classes. Though I've only had about 3 questions so far, I feel better for having an easily accessible place to interact -- the class webpage is terribly important to the class, but it pumps info only one-way.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Ol' LJ and newcomer Facebook.

Dr. Phil