Day off from writing

[altivo]

So, I finished the NaNo again, though the book is far from finished. Still, I feel entitled to take a day off. I'll be back at it tomorrow, because I'm afraid of losing the thread of the complex story if I don't finish the draft soon.

Everyone here is talking about the weather. The NOAA office in Romeoville, which provides our local forecast, has issued a winter storm warning for tomorrow afternoon and evening, 2 pm to midnight. Temperatures starting at 28°F and rising to the mid-40s by morning, with much precipitation. Depending on the rate of temperature change, the storm is supposed to start with snow, move into sleet, and then to freezing rain, ending with ordinary rain. Apparently this is to be caused by a collision of warm wet air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico with cold upper level air coming out of the Rockies.

It's the sort of thing that NOAA gets right once in a while, but just as often they appear to have shouted "wolf" without any canid in sight, and nothing at all happens.

Nonetheless, people are whispering about it and panicking as if the end of the world had been announced, rather than a snowstorm that is going to drop a bunch of glop and then melt it all within 24 hours or so.

At the moment it is pretty clear and very cold for us at this time of year: 18°F

My invitation to join the Ravelry beta came through. I'd forgotten about it, since I asked to be put on the waiting list several weeks ago. It's a site and community forum for fiber workers, primarily knit and crochet but I'm hoping they'll add weaving and spinning to it soon. Looks good, though. I had to make a Flickr account in order to post photos to Ravelry, so I'll probably start using that for LJ images too. Before long I'm going to drop the Plus account in order to get rid of the advertising, and I need a new way to host the photos that are used here.

SixApart has committed another stupidity with a button added to every post that allows ANYONE to "flag" your message for review, essentially complaining about your content and saying it is offensive to them. I don't expect much to come of it since their review queue is going to quickly fill up with political and religious messages that were offensive to someone from the "other side". Or blue-nosed little old lady complaints that someone used the F word...

Comments

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Oh, you've got a Flickr account now? If you want to tell me your name there, I'll add you to my friends so you'll be able to see my friends-only pictures on there. :) (Not that there really are more than a few, of course.)

[altivo.livejournal.com]

I'm easy. It's Altivo over there too. (And on Ravelry.)

I'll add you back, though I don't think I've ever posted a friends-only photo.

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I'm getting this:

"We couldn't find any people who matched altivo."

:/

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Bizarre. I just went to the site and it recognizes me immediately and says "You are signed in as Altivo". But when I search for myself, I'm not there.

I have three photos posted too, and they are showing up from Ravelry.

I suppose I may have something set up wrong. Flickr is extremely slow to use over dialup.

I did a search for "schneelocke" and it finds two. "Simon Schneelocke" and "simeon.schneelocke". Are they both you?

[altivo.livejournal.com]

OK, search by e-mail address finds me: tivo.overo @ gmail.com

[schnee.livejournal.com]

No, neither of those is me - I'm this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/schneelocke/

Weird that I'm not showing up there. :/

[schnee.livejournal.com]

Ah, OK, found you! :)

Found you

[altivo.livejournal.com]

OK, as soon as the page actually loads (wait wait wait) I'll add you as a friend too. I can't imagine what their problem is that makes them so incredibly slow. Even considering the dialup connection, Flickr is one of the worst sites I've tried to deal with. I can see I'll mostly handle it from work.

I'm grinning at your fruitcake photos. Looks like you did all right. Now I'm going to have to make some myself.

Re: Found you

[schnee.livejournal.com]

*s* I'm glad you like them. Mmm, I still think it's a pity I didn't take pictures of the finished product, but I can assure you it was very tasty, and I can't thank you enough for the wonderful recipe. ^.^

As for Flickr, it's very heavy on Javascript, I think - presumably, that's part of the problem. :|

Re: Found you

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Javascript should run fast enough on this machine. I think they just have designed their resources poorly so that way too much stuff gets downloaded over and over again rather than being cached and reused. It's a common problem now. The page designers are too far removed from the actual network mechanics, and have no idea. Since they work in close proximity to their servers and probably have a gigabit ethernet link or similar, they are completely unaware that their stuff is so inefficient.

When you complain, the answer is always "It works fine here, so it must be your computer or software."

Re: Found you

[schnee.livejournal.com]

It should run fast enough, yes, but I still think it's part of the problem. For example, I've found that Flickr pages always take a short while to load, and that time is spent with Mozilla maxing out the CPU; this is particularly apparent when you open several Flickr pages in background tabs at the same time and let them all load at the same time, too. It's really quite annoying, but I don't think it can be explained in terms of bandwidth or latency.

FWIW, it's not a Mozilla problem, either: Opera acts the same way, and in fact, parts of Flickr (the Organizr, specifically) are pretty much unusable in Opera.

Re: Found you

[altivo.livejournal.com]

You clearly know a lot more about it than I do. I do know that I'm not fond of sites that use a lot of java or javascript in general. However, doesn't LJ use large quantities of it without those obnoxious effects?

Re: Found you

[schnee.livejournal.com]

I don't know - I'm sure LJ uses its fair share, too, but I think Flickr is a very Javascript-y, AJAX-ladden site. Which is not necessarily bad thing in itself, of course, but as long as browsers' implementations of Javascript aren't more optimised than they are, it's a bit annoying. :/

Thinking about, it could be CSS, too, of course (I really should note that contrary to what it might seem like, I don't actually know all that much about the inner workings of Flickr - I'm just making semi-educated guesses). Mozilla at least can take quite a while to render complex CSS layouts, especially if they involve large tables (such as my friends page); I'm not sure how Opera fares in that regard, though. I guess I'll check - if Opera handles my friends page without problems, for example, the slowness with Flickr likely won't be due to CSS formatting.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

I'll bet your still dreaming about the story though.

^.~

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, especially since I'm still trying to decide which of about three alternate paths to the desired ending it will take. I can get there, which is what I was panicked about two weeks ago, but now I have to choose the route.

[saythename.livejournal.com]

Everyone lives, a total happy ending.

Why not? Sad endings are for CNN.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

Oh, indeed, all the protagonists live and there is a happy ending. That was planned from the start. There are just multiple mechanisms by which I could arrive at the desired results.

One villain has to go, but does he die or run away? Another gets reformed. And certain pressures still have to be applied to the good guys in order to achieve the desired decisions on their part. XD

[cabcat.livejournal.com]

That sounds like evil weather, although the humidity is starting to become oppressive here. We are having a hell of a lot of rain this year, which is a nice change we had 1.5 inches in one night.

As to that offensive button, I agree it'll cause them way more work and they'll end up getting rid of it.

[altivo.livejournal.com]

The weather continues. We're having winter with a vengeance this year. Slop, ice, snow, sleet, more slop, slush...

I dunno about LJ. I think it's going downhill rapidly. Have you seen the latest discovery about censorship of interest lists?