I've never seen Lulu have so much fun at a museum as she had today at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. What fun it was to watch her run around and get so animated about art. Her favorite was a Renoir, The Daughters of Catulle Mendes (she picked out that postcard at the gift shop) but also fell in love with the Degas' princesses!!! It was really darling listening to her comments - she was sooo giddy!!!

Current Mood: cheerful

(the outfit is a Lulu original)

Current Mood: amused

So my Cleo Mio is a little nutty and loves to bound around in the snow. She loves to bound around everywhere really. Last winter she handled the 16 inch drifts like a champ. The problem is that she hates her coat. She will do everything in her power to try to get it off, so much so that I think she'll hurt herself.

We're having lots of cold fall storms this year and while out on a walk Cleo Mio finally reacted to the chill. It started hailing, she was soaked to the skin and then a gust of wind hit her. The gust was the straw that broke the greyhound's back I guess because she let out a cry, bristled and did this terrible thing that looked like she was trying to go fetal while standing up. I decided that like it or not, she was going to have to wear a jacket from now on when it is nasty out.

But she still hates it. She throws herself into walls in an attempt to drag the coat off and in addition to becoming dangerous for her (she throws herself into walls with a lot of force) I'm a little worried that she'll try to do something unsafe like lay down in the road to try to roll it off or something. She's warmer though.

Does anyone have suggestions for what I can do to get her either a) to be, if not happy, ok in a jacket or b) find her something that suits her better? The jacket she has is fleece lined and waterproof, fits her really well and is adjustable with velcro closures. It is this model by RC Pets:


ETA: It's hard to tell from the photo, but the jacket doesn't close around the chest (at least not in larger sizes) it closes around the neck and the waist and is open from the neck back.

We've made some additions and improvements to Notes!

The Notes feature has been added to two action-taking pages:

• You can now add a Note directly on the Add a friend page - handy if you'd like to mark down where you met them or another name you know them by!
• On the Ban and unban users page (under Account -> Privacy) you can now add a Note, including to a group of users all banned at the same time (so that next year you won't need to ask yourself "hey, why did I ban these guys?")

Other changes:

• When you're viewing your existing Notes they're grayed out; click in a field to activate it to change the text (this page can be found from the header by using Profile -> Manage Notes)
• Changes to editing:
  • When you're going to create a new Note but one already exists, you'll get a warning that you're editing an existing Note
  • You can now delete a note from the "Edit note" pop-up in the hover menu
  • You can now delete notes for multiple selected users on the Manage notes page
  • When you change Notes on "Ban|unban users" page, they can be edited and saved with "Save Changes" button

Tags: notes

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

1. In another effort to zap spam, comments containing links from domains LiveJournal deems untrustworthy are now automatically screened
2. If you sign up to get notifications of the Writer's Block question of the day, you'll now see the daily question in the email notification, so you'll have a little extra time to ponder before you post. You can subscribe to Writers Block notifications here
3. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
4. If you visit a LiveJournal page and get prompted to log in, you'll be returned to the same page after you sign in (Thanks, Dreamwidth)!
5. If you don't edit the timestamp for an entry at all, the entry timestamp will indicate the time the entry was posted instead of the time the Update Journal page was loaded
6. Comments with paddings/backgrounds render correctly within the comment box (and will no longer wrap outside the box and break frames/margins)

New FCK fixes rich text editor!

1. We've updated our RTE (Rich Text Editor) to FCKeditor version 2.6.5
2. When switching from the RTE to HTML editor, links for syndicated feeds are no longer broken
3. RTE now functions properly in Safari 4.0
4. An extra line/space will not be auto-inserted whenever you switch from RTE to HTML editor
5. The insert image link now works correctly in all browsers

LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

A couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in postcards to surround us with LiveJournal community. Thanks for coming through! We've received postcards all the way from Germany, Finland, and Canada and from all over the US, including Texas, Florida, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, Hawaii, and Oklahoma just to name just a handful. We're thrilled with our improved decor.

Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

Tags: bugs, csi wii, fck, lj_cares, lj_photophile, notes, rte, writer's block

Current Mood: cheerful

Eddie is SUCH a little beggar. We're working on it, but he's a total mooch. As shy and submissive as he is, he is totally willing to deal with Stern Voices if it means he might get a treat later (or better yet, get to steal something). Treats are definitely the way to his heart.

So for the longest, I could not get him to go out and potty in our yard by himself. We have fenced yard, suburb in Oslo, so no wild animals or cars or anything. He just would not go out unless I was with him. Over the last month, he goes out now and we've established a routine - quick pee by himself in the morning, playtime/walks in the middle of the day, another quick pee in the afternoon, playtime/walk in the evening, and one final pee right before I go to sleep. When he comes in from that, he gets a dental chew.

Eddie. Loves. Dental. Chews.

So lately, he's figured that he'll try to cheat the system by asking to go potty eleventybillion times, starting around 9pm. He'll come over and stare at you with this intense whippet eyes until you get up, at which point he'll race to the door and start boinging around like a lunatic. He'll run down the steps, stop, then come right back into the house and in the kitchen hopefully. The bathroom is right by the door so whenever I go in the bathroom, he starts whining to be let out.

It took him a really long time to tell me he had to go and we had a lot of accidents in the house, so I'm really glad he's become so... enthusiastic about going out, but it's starting to become reeeeally annoying. After dinner, every time someone even glances at the door, he's like "Yes! Yes, I have to go potty!" and then "Treat now?" Tonight I'm staying up, thanks to Nanowrimo, and he's already had his treat, but he still freaks when I get up and he definitely has emptied his bladder.

Is there anything I can do?? Sometimes it's REALLY hard to do something else when the dog is just STARING at you and being very intense and beggy. Right now, he's going out up to 10 times before bed, when he really only has to pee once.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Posted via LiveJournal.app.

Tags: via ljapp
Current Location: US, New York, New York, New York, 85th St Transverse

Yes, I'm talking about Nessie.  She is wild.  Like, 2 matching bumps on her forehead wild.  She screams and whines to complain.  She is constantly making noise and expressing "her opinion".  When she doesn't like a food I feed her, she gags and then throws it up.  She pushes you away when she doesn't want something.  She screams when you put her in her stroller (but then is perfectly happy once she's outside in the action filled streets).  She loves to watch TV.  She also doesn't like to sleep at night -- she'll wake up, immediately sit up in her crib, nurse and then be awake for a long long time.  So last night, to the delight of our building, I let her "scream it out" (literally) for 1 hour (literally) until she fell asleep.  It was great.

She sure is cute though!!!!!  :-)

Current Mood: amused