Please see
Liv @ Dreamwidth
for all new content after May 2009

(My reasons for abandoning ship)

• Book: The ladies of Grace Adieu [book]
• Long week [diary]
• Remembrance [anniversary]
• Worth reading [linkies]
• Who wants to give me advice? [rfh]
• Google Wave [connections]

Please comment at Dreamwidth, either using your LJ username as an OpenID, or just write your name on an anon comment.

• Cambridge [diary, music]
• You've heard this rant before [rant]
• Parable [gender]
• Book: The Algebraist [book]
• Multicultural [interfaith]
• Excellent weekend [friends]

Please comment at Dreamwidth, either using your LJ name as an OpenID or just writing your name on an anon comment.

I have spontaneously decided to come to Cambridge this weekend. Anyone like to meet up sometime eg Saturday afternoon? I'll likely be mostly in north Cambridge or the town centre most of the time.

I'm planning to go to this early music concert Saturday evening; any takers for joining me? Tickets are quite pricey, as tends to be the case with Cambridge Early Music.

Please comment at Dreamwidth or read comments there. You can use your LJ address as an OpenID, or just write your name.

• Starting afresh [work]
• Book: The lies of Locke Lamora [book]
• Book: Blonde roots [book]
• Not all work [diary]

Please comment at Dreamwidth, using your LJ username as your OpenID, or just write your name.

Most of my LJ access is from my phone, so commenting is hard and so is filling in polls. If you post one of those ticky if you're still reading things, the answer is yes, but not as thoroughly / regularly as I'd like.

If you post a poll or questionnaire asking if I want to be in your filter for a particular topic, the answer is yes as long as you feel comfortable with me reading what you have to say. Sexuality, religion, boring log keeping, whatever. The only exception is that I would prefer to be filtered out of anything involving weight loss progress, but only if that's the way you run your journal, I won't be offended if you post that stuff unfiltered.

If you post something passive-aggressive along the lines of, if my friends really cared about me they would comment more, that's just too bad. Nobody will be happier than me when I have proper internet access again, believe me!

I have a job. And not just any job, but the most perfect job I could possibly imagine.

( excessive squee )

The next three weeks is going to be really really interesting. And the next three years after that. I am not sure when I will next have time to sleep, let alone socialize, though!

Please comment at Dreamwidth or read comments there. You can use your LJ address as an OpenID, or just write your name.

• Book: Cryptonomicon [book]
• Dutiful [diary]
• The quest to stay childfree [medical]
• Book: Children of God [book]
• Book: The believers [book]
• This week [quotidian]
• Book: The Armageddon Blues [book]
• and brought us to reach this season [diary]

Oops, I completely forgot to post here for two weeks! Sorry about that, but please do comment at Dreamwidth if you want to comment. You can use your LJ as an OpenID, or just write your name on an anon comment, or whatever.

• Cambridge Shakespeare [culture, logistics, obsolete]
• Film: Star Trek [film]
• Tech help? [rfh]
• Cambridge social life [culture, friends]

Please comment at Dreamwidth. There is a problem with OpenID but it is due to be fixed imminently.

Reposting this on LJ to make sure people see it:

I'm planning to catch the end of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival season. Anyone want to join me?

The plan is for the charity matinée of Measure for Measure tomorrow (Saturday), which is at 2:30 pm at Robinson College. My parents and cartesiandaemon are probably coming along. You can't book tickets for the charity performances, so it's just a matter of showing up tomorrow afternoon. Obviously if you tell me you're planning to come I'll look out for you at Robinson, but it's not so important. The cost is £14 and the charities are a couple of children's hospices.

• I'm back [logistics]
• London socializing [logistics, obsolete]
• Sibling happiness [family, friends]

Please comment at Dreamwidth, thanks!

• If the Talmud were a blog discussion [Jewish]
• State of the Liv [diary, Jewish]
• Book: Indecent [book, feminism]
• Book: A Civil Campaign [book]
• Music: VNV Nation live (New York 2009) [music]
• Three weekends [diary]
• Excommunication and you [feminism, Jewish]
• Sick [quotidian]
• Book: To say nothing of the dog [book]
• Book: Native Tongue [book, feminism]

I do apologize for letting this get so long, both in number of posts and in time-period; I completely forgot about cross-posting to LJ while I was travelling. I'll do my best to get back into the habit again. Anyway, please comment at Dreamwidth, and don't blame the site because I am dopey about it.

Not very many of them as I've been really really busy moving between countries, but here's a summary.

• Swedish competence [emigration]
  
• The adventure begins [emigration, family, friends]
  
• A week in New York [diary, tourism]

• European elections [political]
  
• I'm probably going to regret posting this... [disability, discussion, feminism]
  
• Weekend [quotidian]

As usual, please comment on the original posts at Dreamwidth.

I'm in the process of transferring my webhosting, so please do not send any emails to my domain for the next few days, until the DNS change has gone through. Instead, please use my gmail address. (If you don't know my real life email addresses, liv [at] dw or private messages or comments on DW will reach me just fine.) All sorted now, emails should reach me as normal.

Thank you to everyone who suggested webhosts; I went with Tagadab rather than NearlyFreeSpeech in the end, because I'm not quite geeky enough for the do-it-yourself attitude at NFS. I do think they have a cool business concept, I just wanted something a bit more user-friendly. I transferred my toy domain polymera.se first, and am very, very satisfied with Tagadab as hosts so far, so I'm now taking the plunge and transferring my main domain. I hope unsubscribing from TalkActive isn't going to turn out too hard...

This entry was originally posted at http://liv.dreamwidth.org/6133.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

• That "mixed" relationship thing [relationships]
  
• Book: Memory [book]
  
• Remembrance of things past [meme, personal]
  
• Shavuot [jewish, quotidian]
  
• My friends are lovely [friends]

Please keep all the comments in one place, at Dreamwidth.

Also, I tidied up the LJ friendslist a bit; the plan was to remove people who are posting primarily or exclusively on Dreamwidth. Anyone who's cross-posting with conversations in both places, I've kept, or that was the plan, anyway. So if you're up in arms because I defriended you and stopped reading your important posts, let me know, it was almost certainly a mistake.

• Decisions [emigration]
  
• Book: Ninas resa ('Nina's journey') [book]
  
• Long weekend [friends]

Please use Dreamwidth to comment so all the comments will be in one place.

• Web hosting [rfh]
  
• By the numbers [work]
  
• Book: The color of light [book]
  
• Looming future [friends, work]

If you don't have access to my locked posts on DW, and you'd like to, let me know. Comments screened on this post because I don't want to discuss things here, but I do need to sort out practical aspects of letting you read locked stuff. If you have a DW account that I don't know about, or if you use OpenID there, and you can't see my locked posts but want to, please tell me which account I should add to my access list! (If you refuse to go near DW to be able to read my locked stuff, that's totally up to you, of course. This post isn't very interesting, it's just work whining, and in general my locked posts are those that discuss work in detail or very occasionally family medical stuff, so you're not missing much.)

I have more invite codes than I can use just now. I'm hoping we've got past the stage where DW feels like a horrible elitist club that only the cool kids can join, and that everyone who wants an account already has one. But if you have changed your mind, let me have an email address and I'll happily send you an invite. And yes, this offer includes random people who just happened to surf past this largely abandoned journal. I think I've donated paid time to everyone I know who is active on DW and doesn't have a paid account already, but I still aim to buy six x six months of time further. So if you'd like to try out paid time, apply here!

• A new beginning [meta]
  
• Rest of the week [family, friends]
  
• Book: Stand on Zanzibar [book]
  
• Linkable content [linkies, meme]
  
• Book: Odysseus and Penelope – an ordinary marriage [book]
  
• Goodbyes [friends, linkies]

Comments disabled on LJ, as I want to keep all the discussion in one place. Please comment at DW using OpenID. I have a couple of spare invite codes if anyone still needs, and my offer of buying paid time for people whom I know and actually plan to use the site still stands. PM me here or at DW or comment on a DW post if you're interested.

So, Dreamwidth. It's a fork of LiveJournal, which in my opinion has most of the advantages without most of the disadvantages. And although nothing is certain in the internet world, I think it has a very good chance of being viable and sustainable at least on a scale of years. In short, I'm excited enough about it that I'm ready to ditch the place that has been my internet home for 6 years, and overcome the inertia of moving and the hassle of keeping up with my friends in two places. Let me make this absolutely clear: it's my friends who are important, not the particular flavour of social networking software we're using to keep in touch!

( cut to spare everybody who's completely sick of hearing about the new shiny thing ) Anyway, for all these reasons, this will be my last post on LJ. Future entries will be at Liv's place over on Dreamwidth. And yes, things are still shaking down, both for the site itself and for my own set-up there, but I'm pretty psyched about finding a new home to love as much as I love LJ.

I am not putting pressure on you to move. Dreamwidth is not going to bring about world peace, it's just another internet site, and if you're basically happy with LJ, why go to the hassle? I'm moving because I'm not happy here any more. I am not cutting you out of my life if you don't want to move to DW. I will continue to read LJ and comment here, at least until they finalize the awesome feature that will let me read all your posts without having to leave DW! I won't cross-post (because I'm a little nervous that doing so would violate LiveJournal's ToS, even though they're not enforcing it at the moment, and also because it's annoying for people who are in both places). I think I'll make occasional posts, perhaps weekly or monthly, with lists of titles of recent DW posts. If you want to read me over there, you're welcome to make an RSS feed there's an RSS feed at liv_dw. I rarely make locked posts, so this isn't a big deal, but if you particularly want to see my occasional comments about work details or family medical issues, I'm happy to friend your LJ account (through the magic of OpenID) so that you can do that without having to join Dreamwidth.

If you do want to join Dreamwidth, and I emphasize it's only if you want to, I won't think any less of you if you're not interested, or if you'd rather stick with the devil you know than trust a newly started site, or whatever, I have a certain number of invite codes. At the moment my list looks like this (deleted names are people who already have accounts from other sources, but do correct me if I deleted you in error):
daharyn
redbird
darcydodo (if you actually want one?)
taimatsu
ravingglory
ajollypyruvate *sent*
tig_b
_hypatia_
jenny_pop (if you're still reading)
------- (new based on this post)
catwithclaws *sent*
hmw26 *sent*
------- (waiting list)
jacquic *sent*
flying_peanuts *sent*
rivermilk *sent*

Comment if you still want the promised code; I have five available right now and I think that covers everybody I've already promised. And comment if you're not on the list yet but want to be added.

I also believe enough in the site that I want to invest in it financially. There's an annoying bug with the payments system right now, such that you have to use a Paypal account to pay, but as soon as that is fixed, I am willing to buy 6 months of paid time for up to 10 people. I'm going to prioritize people who actually intend to use the site, not just namesquat, cos otherwise it's a bit pointless, and I'm afraid I'm not going to pay for random strangers, only if I have at least some idea who you are.

Comments are screened by default, so that you can include an email address to send a code to, or let me know if you have a different name over there so that I can find you on the new site. Or sign up for me to sponsor you with paid time. But I'll unscreen any general chat about your opinions of Dreamwidth or this post or whatever.

I've been wandering round the UK since Sunday evening, including two interviews, and I'm now chez parents.

( 4 days in the life )

The lecturing job said they would let me know that day or the next, but I've heard nothing. This is leading me to suspect that I'm their reserve candidate, and they are waiting for confirmation from their first choice before they turn me down. I shall nag them tomorrow, but I'm prepared for disappointment. The research job said they are intending to do most of their interviews at the end of May, so I won't hear for a few weeks anyway. So now I just wait and hope.

I won't make it to the Carlton as planned tomorrow, since my parents sort of randomly invited my sibs for dinner without consulting me first. I'm slightly annoyed at having my plans changed on me, but I am very happy for the chance to see Thuggish Poet, so I don't mind too much. OTOH I do intend to show up to the Pembury for doseybat's party on Saturday.

I'm really glad that siderea made a post at some point explaining that intelligence and avidity are different things. This semester I had a class of six students, three boys and three girls. It soon became clear that the girls range between fairly and very avid but aren't very bright, and the boys are reasonably to highly capable but are just coasting. It's always a little worrying when a group divides precisely along gender lines like that, but I'm fairly certain that it's just a statistical blip and not a result of my making biased assumptions.

( more teaching notes )

After finding the class slightly frustrating, I do feel good about the outcome by the end of the course; I made some real connections. Yay teaching!

I'm working on some journal layouts for Dreamwidth, and it's getting to the point where it's mildly annoying to work in a non-specialist text editor. In specific, I want to be able to do the split screen thing that you can do in Word, so that I can simultaneously see where I set up properties at the top of the several thousand line code, and where I use the properties in the body. (I do know enough not to write code in Word itself!) Also, if I had a widget that would automatically colour in my brackets for me so I can see at a glance if they match, that would be kind of nice too.

Does anyone have any suggestions for an editor with both those features? It would be ideal if it runs under Windows, but DOS or in a browser will do at a pinch.

(When this is done, the same property is going to have the same name no matter what layout you use, and most except a few very specialist features are going to be common to all layouts. The guiding principle is that you shouldn't have to choose between form and function. The next pass is going to do the same for CSS classes, making them consistent across all site-provided layouts. Did I mention I love Dreamwidth?)