Water, water everywhere...
Apr. 30th, 2009 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
altivoThe pastures are flooded, perhaps the worst I've seen in the eleven years we've been here. I attribute this not just to recent rainfall, which has been steady but only a half inch a day or so, but to the destruction wrought upon the local drainage system by developers to our immediate north and uphill, and the neighbors to the west who have cut hundreds of trees out in a two year period and then overgrazed the newly exposed areas. The water that used to be held back and absorbed by dense woods on that neighboring land is now running over the surface and downhill into our pastures, carrying with it a lot of the remaining topsoil from next door. The arsehole developers, who are total greedy idiots, "sculpted" what used to be a 200+ acre cornfield to make "attractive" hills and dales. The water is collecting in the low places. That field was tiled to carry off excess moisture, but of course they broke up the tile system. The low areas are supposed to function as "retaining ponds" (euphemism for mosquito breeding grounds) but they don't retain. The water percolates through the ground and emerges just uphill of us, where it all runs over our pasture and out our creek. All this probably has the makings of a gigantic lawsuit in it, but of course if I bothered the attorneys would get all the funds and I'd still be stuck with the flooding. This part of Illinois was one vast swamp back in the 1840s when Chicago was young. After the Civil War returning soldiers worked digging trenches and laying tile lines by hand to drain the fields that then provided ultra rich soil for corn, beans, and vegetables. Now developers are being allowed to break up that huge drainage system in order to make profits from the resale of farmlands as suburban housing tracts, and the swamps and floods are returning. Gee. Who would have expected that? There is no history, of course, anything that happened before we were born, or that we [conveniently] don't remember becomes a myth that never happened.
Dreamwidth, a new blogging site based on LJ software with enhancements and active management, is going to open beta status as of tonight. That means they are starting to sell paid accounts, but it also means that free accounts are being made easier to get. I already had a beta tester account, so I have a small number of "invitations" I can send out. If you had already registered using OpenID, then you don't have to ask for an invitation. They say they will be sending you one automatically in the next day or two. But if you had not yet registered at all, and want a free account, you will need an invitation. I'll pass the ones I have out first come, first served. Just let me know. I'll need the e-mail address to which you want the invitation sent. You do not have to register the account from that address, but can use a different e-mail to register if you choose. Send me e-mail or a private message on LJ if you are interested.
Dreamwidth, a new blogging site based on LJ software with enhancements and active management, is going to open beta status as of tonight. That means they are starting to sell paid accounts, but it also means that free accounts are being made easier to get. I already had a beta tester account, so I have a small number of "invitations" I can send out. If you had already registered using OpenID, then you don't have to ask for an invitation. They say they will be sending you one automatically in the next day or two. But if you had not yet registered at all, and want a free account, you will need an invitation. I'll pass the ones I have out first come, first served. Just let me know. I'll need the e-mail address to which you want the invitation sent. You do not have to register the account from that address, but can use a different e-mail to register if you choose. Send me e-mail or a private message on LJ if you are interested.
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Date: 2009-05-02 06:25 pm (UTC)OpenID is enabled when you go to post a comment, and the system doesn't recognize you. It offers three choices (true for either LJ or DW): Anonymous, OpenID, or Registered user with password. If you choose OpenID, then it prompts you for your URL on an OpenID site. So if you're posting to DW, you'd put soanos.livejournal.com there. Then you get prompted for an e-mail address and to choose a password for the OpenID. They send a message to the e-mail address with a link you have to click to validate the account. After that you can sign into DW with the OpenID URL and the password you chose, and comment on journals the same way a DW user can. It's not the same as having a DW account, but it lets you comment with a known identity and associate icons with that identity.
Works the same way on LJ, and you can validate in there using a DW URL.
If you have actual accounts on both sites, then there's no need for OpenID as far as I can see.