Sinus update.

Because it's all about the sinuses, baby. Ooog. I did have a nice hot soak and then shower, and that got the worst of it out, but I'm still not fully equipped in the breathing department.

I'm hoping that I'll wake up feeling just fine, but my muscles are sore from merely the amount of sneezing that I've been doing, and I'm wondering if I'm running a fever. (I'm also wondering if the boys didn't pass on something while they were climbing all over me.)

Tuesday of Exhaustion

http://www.livejournal.com/shop/charity.bml -- Rosie the Riveter & Women for Women are this month's pairing.
http://trollprincess.livejournal.com/1086261.html -- "Real Men Don't Make Cheesecake" -- still a favorite.
http://community.livejournal.com/lightningwatch/33668.html?thread=361092#t361092 -- The world is crumbling around us! The sanctity of Hogwarts is threatened! (If you think this means that Bruno is currently an NPC in lightning_war, you might be right.)
http://www.spawn.com/news/news2.aspx?id=12846 -- woah.
Diebold backs sloooowly away from the voting machines. Do the machines get a vote?
suggestions is looking for a volunteer. Yes, I applied. I had it loaded up and was regarding it, and then someone poked me about it, so I figured I should.

Why does this feel like a ratings comm application?

a) Time. This, if anything, is where I'd fall short. My time is in short supply and high demand these days, but it averages out to less than an hour a day, so I think I could swing that as long as I kept caught up with what was going on, and I think I know how to do that painlessly, as described in b).

b) As far as "refreshing pages and reading what others have to say" goes, I submit for consideration my summaries of LJ news posts and their comments. :) I have the LJ Comment Unfolder installed in Firefox, and have a few Suggestions discussions of interest already being tracked. If I changed this to alerting me every time someone posted to suggestions, and then subscribed to comments on every post after unfolding and reading everything, I wouldn't have to deliberately make time to work on this.

c) I can stay chill in a heated news discussion, and be patient and respectful there, as well as my track record in this community. Even when my allergies act up. *tchoo*

d) I'm pretty sure I have this one down, and I also have decent skill in taking a would-be flame and directing it into more productive discussion. Given adequate opportunity to vent, I can avoid poking situations that would be only inflamed by my intervention. I know how to both screen and freeze. I have successfully gotten note_to_cat through a few declawing and shelter flamewars, and have quashed attempts to use the community as a rallying place for a flamewar elsewhere.

e) Neither admin nor Abuse!


... I do have a permanent account already, so attempting to apply paid time to my account would be a little useless.

norabombay has a 13-song introduction to rap and hip-hop, backed up with YouTubes of the music videos.

As I was suspecting I would, I am staying home from work today, on the grounds that a) they are not surprised, and b) I really do need the down-time to get better. I have a dentist appointment later on today; I need to be OK to go to that. I told Pink Shirt Guy to feel free to call me about any questions he has about the $PAPERWORK. He hasn't done that form in months; I hope he'll be OK. Meanwhile, I'm getting worn out from just sitting and reading. hcolleen has made me hot tea ♥, and has wandered out to obtain lunch breakfast.

Inactive Users, and the strain they put on LJ's resources

This is a periodic rant, inspired by suggestions today. Expanded from the source:

There seems to be a wide-spread misconception that inactive accounts are some sort of strain on LJ's resources. They are not. Yes, they are taking up namespace, and they are taking up some storage space, but it is not the great hindrance on LJ's performance that people tend to think it is.

If an account hasn't been touched for a while, it is moved to the "inactive" cluster, to get it out of the way of active journals in the database, but it was still accessible and easy (invisibly easy) to re-activate if the user ever decided to return to the journal.

Active users who are using LJ are posting new entries, refreshing their friends page, leaving comments, and loading images. They're not just sitting there and quietly gathering dust on what's probably less than a gig worth of text. Storage these days, in amounts that the average person buys, is around $1/gig -- you can get a 200-gig hard drive for around $200.

The maximum entry size is 64k. That's not much when you're talking about image sizes, but that's a considerable amount of text. One of my friends has the collected works of Shakespeare in a file that's around 150 megabytes. In order for someone to have 1 gigabyte of storage used up by entries, they'd have to have 16,300-odd entries at the maximum entry size. Userpics and styles and assorted database overhead (entry titles, moods, music, etc.) would account for some more, but text really isn't that large to store. (I have 21,000-odd entries, accumulated over nearly six years now. I'm one of the edge cases. I still probably have under a gig of text stored, given that most of the entries wouldn't have hit 64k.)

Thinking about the $1/gig price range, and the fact that most users would have accounts under a gig, two virtual gifts would more than cover LJ's storage cost for each inactive user.

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Waiting for dentist. Hcolleen hanging out at nearby restaurant. I should finally get the crown. I still feel rotten, but at least this is not sneezing.

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We will likely have to call it a night early. But this lethargy is far preferable to being miserable and sneezing. I forgot a book. Alas.

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Young punk in here playing like he wanted to buy the place. Usually, that is not preceded by "hey check this out" to a buddy. Asshole, said the receptionis

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The guy who was arm wrestling with his neice gave off this awful creepy vibe. It scared me and hit too close to home. Spooky.