How many times have I wished that I could stop?

Three days of nothing. Three days. What could I have done differently?

Planned, for starters. I can't do things impulsively anymore. Impulse is what rules me. Impulses are what I do every day, but it's always the same. Compelled to stay on the computer. Compelled to drift into a world of pure information. I need things to snap me out of that. Normally it's other people, but in this place, I can stay in my room for as long as I like. The only exception being dinner time.

And now I'm here. And I have a quiz tomorrow. At nine AM.

I'm breaking a promise right now. I'm supposed to turn off the computer at midnight. I keep breaking it, and it's my fault for not putting in a wake-up call for myself. Whenever I stay on, it's always, always an escape from guilt. I'm realizing this now. There's a correlation between homework not done and study notes not studied and me staying up, because I want to do the work, but I don't want to do the work. Hence the limbo of computer land.

At 1:00 precisely, I started to freak out. I started repeating, "I have to do it, I can't do it, I have to do it, I have to do it" over and over again and felt compelled to hit myself with various objects. The computer was supposed to be shut off. At midnight. And I had shut it off, if only an hour later. But I still needed to do the assignments. I still needed to study. And the study notes were on the computer, and I couldn't do the journal in note book form, and blah blah blah...

Terrible bad habits.

And I'm not even doing work now. Is writing itself a form of escapism? No, at this point it's helpful, but it's still avoidance. Writing it all out at least faces the fear, which is what is blocking me from starting.

I used to think that 21 would be the quintessential me, the point in which i'd be happy with myself, finally free of all the angst and guilt and heartache I've felt during my teenage years. But no. If anything, this is me starting to wake up from all that. Stuff like that takes hard work, which isn't something I've been exactly exposed to in my life.

At least now I'm starting to realize what it's going to take. And what it's going to take is indeed mindfulness, not just being aware but planning on being aware. Scheduling. Writing it out. Having the integrity to plan things out, because the only thing my mind can focus on are actual schedules. Finding out what time dinner is exactly and plan around it. Do everything I can to make the date.

I need to stop being such a baby and own up to things. I need to take control. It's just one class. One. FUCKING. Class! Why am I so scared of it?

Enough of this. Signing off.

Tags: late night freak-out, the bad habits, therapeutic write-outs
Current Location: Kitchen table.
Current Music: 01 Silent Hill

"Everyone is Afraid of Something"
Dannye Romine Powell

Once I was afraid of ghosts, of the dark,
of climbing down from the highest
limb of the backyard oak. Now I'm afraid

my son will die alone in his apartment.
I'm afraid when I break down the door,
I'll find him among the empties-bloated,
discolored, his face a stranger's face.

My granddaughter is afraid of blood
and spider webs and of messing up.
Also bees. Especially bees. Everyone,
she says, is afraid of something.

Another fear of mine: that it will fall to me
to tell this child her father is dead.

Perhaps I should begin today stringing
her a necklace of bees. When they sting
and welts quilt her face, when her lips
whiten and swell, I'll take her
by the shoulders. Child, listen to me.
One day, you'll see. These stings
Are nothing. Nothing at all.

Recopied from exceptindreams

Can anybody recommend an external desktop hard drive that's 2TB, and preferably has a firewire interface?

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

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.

how do i make my new external hard drive work with my PowerBook?

following a friend's instructions, i formatted it to exFAT on a PC (on quick format). when that didn't work, i took my HD to the Apple Center and they formatted it for me (i didn't see what went on in the screen). am i doing something wrong? (my laptop is running OSX 10.5.6 if that matters.)

Hey guys, I have three questions for you all:

1. I've recently bought Snow Leopard and I was just wondering what's the best way to install this. Should I install it over my existing copy of Leopard so I don't lose my files or install it with an empty and fresh HD? I know completely starting over is probably the best option for my computer, but it's just a nuisance and so time consuming. Is there any way I can install my apps again without having to redownload them with the dmg files? Some of the apps I have aren't available for download anymore, so I'd hate to lose them.

2. As summer is approaching, my fan is starting to work on overdrive. Do you guys have any cheap and affordable suggestions to keep it cool?

3. My battery has done 403 cycles, so it's time I get a new one, right? I have to constantly keep my MBP plugged in to the charger. When I first got my MBP, I wasn't aware of calibration, but if I do this every month with a new battery, how long can it last for?

Thanks for all your help!

 what is good for writing resumes on a mac?

i have open office but do not see anything

I am still trying to google this but am finding conflicting information. I'm travelling for work with a macbook from Canada - currently, I'm in Lebanon, and using a voltage converter that has an option for 50W or 1500W - it says on it to use 50W for everything except hairdryers. Except that when I plug my laptop in, it eventually overheats and starts melting the converter.

What am I doing wrong? I've used this converter with no issues elsewhere....

I have a question regarding Quick Time. Kindof.

So I have a video file that is in .avi format, and whenever I try to play it with Quick Time it has no sound.

I also tried opening it with DivX and it says this:

You may need an additional audio decoder to play the soundtrack of this file.

 

This file contains a track in the Dolby AC3 Audio (code "8192") format. You may need to install a DirectShow decoder for this audio format in order to hear the soundtrack of this file.

I have tried looking online for decoders, but all of the ones I can find are for windows.

Any help would be appreciated.