I had a few hours to myself and I visited three flea-markets in the Brantford and Freelton area. I saw and bought a few games today.

In one place in Brantford I bought a couple of vintage boxed RPGs circa mid to late 1980s. There was a first edition of the Pacecetter Chill RPG and the 2nd edition (boxed) of West End Games Paranoia. Each was $5. Neither had dice, and the previous owner of Paranoia had razored off the spine and had the whole book comb bound!

In another place in Brantford I bought a decent Avalon Hill edition of Sick Sackson's Acquire board game, also for $5.

In Freelton the flea market had no RPG material (I had purchased a 2nd edition boxed started edition D&D set there last year), but that had a few interesting board games I passed over. There was the 1959 edition of The Perry Mason "Case of the Missing Suspect" Game, and a very rare copy of Dennis Wheatley's 1953 crime boardgame Alibi (complete with lead miniatures, clue cards and a map of England). What I did do there was to do a double-take and buy 1970 copy of the Ideal family game Quick Shoot.

Quick Shoot is a game of rootin'-tootin'-marble shootin' where you shot marbles in an plastic enclosure through a circle to hit a bell, this in competition with three others (think of the reverse of Hungry Hungry Hippos). I had a copy of this same game when I was much younger, circa 1972-73 and for $6 the price couldn't be beat since all the pieces (save the marbles; there were newer replacements inside) were intact with no cracks or scratches. Just a few minutes ago I assembled it in the basement and suddenly remembered just how hard a game it was trying to shoot a marble through that little hole to hit the bell!

::B::

Back home in L.A. and lagged to hell and back. There'll be words when I'm more coherent but meanwhile here are some pix, from Edinburgh, Stirling, and Glasgow.

Wondering if anyone has this album? I heard they're really good.

Yes; I'm still in Florida with my folks. Not doing much but hanging out, going out to meals and reading for Best Horror #2. Helped my mom get onto facebook, which means I need to be discreet (hi mom!) in case she actually reads it.

The dial up is better than previously. I hope that by the time I'm here next they'll have wireless throughout the community. Right now, it's only in the clubhouse.

The weather is gorgeous. Sunny, hot, cool in the shade. Eat your hearts out northerners :-).

Does anyone have the Exorcism of Emily Rose Soundtrack? The music is composed by Christopher Young I believe? I cant find it anywhere. I will love you forever if someone has it. zipped mp3 format please. thank you so much!!

Hello. I couldn't find it in the tags but does anyone have Taylor the latte boy sung by brian harden? Thanks!

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!

( Read more... )

Curtains

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

Hello, music lovers! I've created the latest music-sharing post over at sexy_mood_music. You don't have to join to contribute links because the post will be left open all month till the next one goes up. However, you're more than free to join and have a look around at the other stuff offered at the comm, including all manner of graphics. In keeping with Thanksgiving, this month's theme is "Thank You For The Music!,". Simply put, we're on the prowl for songs that for any reason at all make you grateful for your ability to hear. Explanations as to why you love your choices are encouraged, but not necessary. As always, all musical genres are welcome so please do share with my comm's members if you feel so inclined!

[Remember to change 'hxxp' to 'http' for each link!]

Here's some of what I uploaded for November's entry:
Joan Jett and the Blackhearts - Do You Wanna Touch Me (Oh Yeah)
Little Anthony and the Imperials - Going Out Of My Head
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Man

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.