I made it to NY around midnight last night.

This morning I made my way to the hotel's (quite nice) fitness center, where I finished W4D1. I really have to say that it's the hardest thing I've done physically in quite a while. I had to talk myself into keeping going 'til the end by telling myself that I haven't given up on one yet, and now is not the time to start. When I was done, I sat around the fitness center for five or ten minutes, then came up to the room and collapsed on the bed for a while before I was able to move. The jump from W3 to W4 seems to be too large to me, and I can see why that's where people start giving up.

After a quick lunch we saw a new David Mamet play called Race, which is currently in previews on Broadway. The cast is made up of four people-- James Spader, David Alan Grier, Kerry Washington, and Richard Thomas. It's a fascinating play, but I wasn't terribly impressed with the performances or the direction. The whole show felt very rushed to me, like the director couldn't stand any pauses in the action. One character in particular was really bad-- I've seen better acting in high school shows.

I'm hoping it cleans up its act before the official opening, since the play itself is quite interesting.

Tomorrow, who-knows-what in the daytime, and a lovely dinner in the evening. Monday afternoon I take off for Glasgow.

Postcard winners!

We wish to extend our heartfelt gratitude for sending so much joy our way. Frank is still blushing with excitement over the love notes, proposals, propositions, and occasional intimate photos sent from his admirers around the world (China, Norway, Japan, and Poland just this week)! At his request, we blindfolded Justin, one of Frank's BFFs, spun him around in five dozen counterclockwise circles, and asked him to point to ten random postcards/envelopes pasted to the wall. After a brief trip to the bathroom, he chose the following lucky winners, to whom we will give a six-month paid account token (for paid, basic, and plus users) or, for our permanent account holders, a $15 voucher for the LiveJournal gift shop.

So, without further ado, the winners are:

1. seraphene
2. fotog
3. boykitten
4. seshat_6
5. anti_aol
6. lisalees
7. katrinkacat
8. mistyboston
9. _woody_lein
10. another_slender

Bugs, Tweaks, and Enhancements

1. We fixed a bug from the last release that was causing screened comments to become unscreened if they were edited
2. If you happen to be gaming around the corner, check us out on Facebook and be sure to spread the word!
3. We've added new vgifts to celebrate Thanksgiving! Check out our feathered friend, below!

Give more with charitable vgifts

In honor of national adoption month, we're offering a charitable vgift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that provides healthcare and adoption to orphans suffering from life-threatening diseases. LiveJournal will donate 100% of gross proceeds from the sale (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries vgifts in the Virtual Gift shop. We'll keep you posted on how much we raise!

Photos of the week

We're delighted to showcase yet more incredible photos from some of our brilliant LiveJournal photographers around the world. Keep posting (and tagging). And be sure to show some love by commenting on the awesome view at lj_photophile.

Check out this week's photos and more amazing user content after the jump!

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Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. See you next week!

"Sheryl Cotleur, the head buyer for Book Passage, which operates stores in Corte Madera and San Francisco, said the two stores have sold exactly two copies of the book. That works out to one copy per store."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/19/DDHJ1AMAC3.DTL#ixzz0XK9CcvPM

Or maybe the editorial staff at SFGate is slipping. If you were editing that story, would you leave the last sentence in? (Re: Palin's book.)

I realized something tonight about why a physical keyboard is so valuable to me. It's not just that it's far easier to type on, although even the Droid's crappy keyboard is a million times better than the soft keyboard. The real reason is that a physical keyboard leaves 100% of the screen real estate available for useful data. I'm a pixel slut-- want to have as much data available to me as possible. Taking away half the screen so that I can have a soft keyboard really just sucks.

ssh looks really great on the Droid's screen-- I can have an 80-column display. This is a huge win for me.

The email app on the Droid sucks big hairy gorilla balls. The biggest problem I have with it is that there's no way to delete all messages-- you have to either delete them one at a time, or tap each one to star it and then delete the whole group. This sucks even more than it sounds like it does. What the fsck were they thinking?

Having dedicated-GPS-style voice navigation on my phone is hugely useful. It's clear that this is a 1.0 release, and the software could definitely stand some improvements, but having something that's 80% as good as my Garmin but is with me at all times is absolutely wonderful. My biggest issue with the driving directions is that it sometimes gives instructions too late or almost too late. I've seen this several times, but the biggest one is heading home for me. The route home involves taking the curve from 980 to 880 south, then just as you exit the curve taking the Jackson exit. Google maps inevitably tells me to take the Jackson exit about three seconds before it's too late. It seems like the instructions are so busy telling you to get onto 880 (which you can't avoid doing) that it isn't prepared to tell you about the next big thing that's coming up.

My Garmin will often say, "Turn left at FooBar Street, then turn left." Google nav will say, "Turn left at FooBar Street", then wait 'til you're pretty close to the next turn before warning you about it. On the other hand, it's cool that the screen shows you street view images. I don't see them much, since I'm paying attention to the road and just listening to the voice, but it's a cool idea.

The voice is mechanical. I don't find that annoying, but I can see how some people would.

I just realized... I wonder how well navigation works if you're outside of cell range. I don't know how much pre-caching it does of maps, routes, etc.

Battery life is pretty decent for a high-end smartphone. The screen sucks batteries pretty badly, but I expected that. I plug it in when I'm navigating in the car but otherwise only at night, and I usually have 60% battery life left each evening.

The kittens have been here a little over two months now. Boo is aggressively cuddly, but Peek is much more standoffish. She likes being around me, but she's less inclined to actually snuggle.

She just came over and sat at my feet and demanded to be petted. A first!

So I've set up a Google calendar to go with the Droid. That makes me unhappy for a variety of reasons, but it makes sense so I'll go with it.

Cool. So United provides flight info to me in vCal format. I should just be able to import that into the Google calendar, right? It's not so easy. I have to download every single leg of the flight individually to a file on my local machine, then one by one go through the import process on the Google calendar.

It seems like there should be some much easier way to do this, but I'm sure as hell not seeing it. Help?

I'm home from the gym, having just finished week 3 day 3.

The three-minute runs are still hard work. About halfway through, I wasn't the least bit convinced that I was ready to move on to week four, so I decided to try an experiment. Can I run five minutes without stopping?

The scheduled run was 90s run, 90s walk, 3min run, 3min walk, then repeat. Ms. Overachiever decided that she was going to try to do a 5min run as the last one, rather than a 3min. If she succeeded she'd move on to week four. If not, she'd do remedial week three.

Guess what? I can run five minutes without stopping. I probably could have done more, but I'm not crazy. (Well, maybe.) The three-minute run gets to "this is annoyingly hard", but it doesn't seem to get much worse if I keep going beyond that.

I also decided to pay a lot of attention to my heart rate, in particular how long it takes for me to recover from a run. I know what my baseline walking-at-a-moderate-pace heart rate is, and what I hit at the end of a running segment. It takes me about 60 seconds to recover from a 90-second run, and about two minutes to recover from a three-minute run. That last one is interesting (to me, at least) because week four starts with a three-minute run followed by a 90-second walk. I think I'll be OK, though.

I saw Goats Who Stare At Men tonight, and I realized something sort of sad.

Kevin Spacey has been ruined for me as an actor by the movie 21. I can't watch him without sort of mentally overlaying JP onto whatever character he's playing. In the goat movie, this is especially humorous.

I noticed this a few weeks ago: Miley Cyrus's song "Party in the USA" has a line or two that goes "I'm nodding my head like yeah, moving my hips like yeah" And then! And then there's that Black Eyed Peas song "I Gotta Feeling" where they have that verse that goes "Go out and smash it, like oh my god"

Jesus, those are some of the most awful lyrics I've heard. Seriously, they had absolutely nothing better to say? It's like when people tell stories, like, about someone they're excited to see and they say "And then I was like ahhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!" instead of using words. (Hard to convey the intonation in text -- that's "ahhh" as in screaming with excitement, not a sign of relief or fear.) Anyway, I realized that it grates on me because it's only barely better than using grunts and sounds to convey meaning. Really, people?


For a minute or two I thought I was after the same thing that Snacks and Shit goes after -- but no, it's not, because Snacks and Shit goes after real lyrics that actually make no sense upon further inspection. That site's actually worth a read if you think rap lyrics are ridiculous. ... Because, yeah, they are.

Let's say that you've purchased some small, inexpensive yet somewhat specialized item. For the sake of argument, let's say that the price was about a buck fifty. For whatever reason. you wound up not having a use for the item, and you think it's unlikely that you'll have use for it in the future. It's returnable, but you would have to go out of your way to take it back.

What do you do?

I'm going to be traveling November 20-29. My regular cat sitter may or may not be in town during that time. Would anyone in the area be willing to take care of the kittens while I'm gone if she's not available? It would entail coming by my place about every other day to make sure that the furballs have food and water.

I went to the gym and ran tonight-- W3D2 is done. My heart wasn't in it quite as much as it has been on previous days, but I got through it and then some-- I tacked on a two-minute fast run at the end. I left my headphones at home, so I wound up watching whatever was on the TV at the gym. The irony of staring at the Food Network while running was not lost on me, and I felt like a greyhound chasing a rabbit-- "Faster! Faster! If I run fast enough I can catch Alton Brown's souffle!."

Or maybe it was, "if you didn't eat so much of this stuff, running wouldn't be so bloody hard."

On the way home, I stopped at the grocery store to clean up the odds and ends that were on my shopping list. My cashier was an older Asian woman, probably Chinese. She scanned while I did the debit card drill and didn't pay much attention to the goings-on. Then she asked for ID.

I did a mental doubletake. I'd considered buying a bottle of wine, but decided against it, and I was almost certain there was no alcohol in my cart. "Really? Why?"

She held up a bottle of Nyquil. "You have to be 18 to buy this." Ummmmm, yeah. I'm going to be 45 in nine days. People tell me I don't look that old, but I can't remember the last time anyone questioned my legal status to drink, let alone consume an over-the-counter cold remedy.

I extended my drivers' license, and a wave of embarrassment crossed her face. "Umm, your hair. I guess... I thought..."

She neglected to ask me whether I needed help getting groceries to my car, which was probably a wise move on her part.

I installed PDANet from June Fabrics on the Droid. Bluetooth tethering doesn't seem to work very well, but wired tethering is great. I used it while I was at the car dealership today, and it was very robust and speedy.

I mostly love the phone. My biggest complaint is that the indicators for voicemail, missed calls, and text messages are small and non-obvious. Also, you can't change the ringer volume (such as to set the phone to vibrate) without going through the process of turning on and unlocking the phone-- I'm used to just flipping a switch on the Treo. The email app is pretty crappy.

Google turn-by-turn driving directions are good if a bit rough-- I've gotten some of the voice commands a bit later than is reasonable. The screen is fantastic, and the keyboard is starting to suck less. Voice search is an amusing toy, though I couldn't get it to search for my name-- it insisted on searching for Patty Beatle.

Still, it's a pretty slick phone, and way more usable than the iPhones I've played with.

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. The issue causing random comments to vanish has been fixed!
3. 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)!
4. 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
5. 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!

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Curtains

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

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I've been so busy boring you with running stories that I haven't bothered to bore you with kitten tales. They both have a tendency to follow me around the loft and hang out wherever I am. If I'm at the computer they'll hang out under my desk or nearby. If I go upstairs to bed, they'll hang out up there. If I go to the bathroom, they poopervise.

Boo is turning into a right proper moose-- he's huge. He's also quite affectionate, and when I get home he generally comes over and meows at me until I pick him up and put him on my lap, or at the very least pet him. He's happy to curl up in my lap, and he likes being brushed. When he purrs, it sounds more like a wheeze.

Peek is more distant. She's sometimes quite happy to be petted, and sometimes runs off when I get near her. She's content to be close by, though. I'm typing this from the bed, and she's curled up on the bed at my feet purring.

They're both still pretty skittish, though. Sometimes they'll run and hide when I come near them, though not always. I probably shouldn't say this for fear of jinxing myself, but they seem remarkably good at not being troublemakers.