development corrupts

Flickr made a couple of changes, most notably removing any kind of integration with custom services, which has made it pretty useless to, so now I'm looking for another photo host.

Any ideas?

Okay, not sure what happened, but a muscle on my back, along my left shoulderblade, is hurting a lot. (It was my right yesterday, and then shifted to my left after I started babying my right).

It was probably something innocuous like I slept at a wrong angle, or something. It doesn't feel critical? permanent? But it's been hurting hard enough/for long enough that I am putting lots of thought into not aggravating it further.

( some details )

Is there any way to tell whether the massage is a good idea, or whether it could be hurting me longer term somehow? And is there any way to tell whether I'd be better off trying to move those muscles slowly and carefully over the course of the day, to keep them loose (it causes short term pain, but feels less painful long term, but I don't know if it might cause damage somehow), or else to keep that part as still as possible to avoid any further injury?

I didn't buy it just because I was waiting, I swear...

I've been wanting to buy new RAM for a while now, but the place I was originally looking at has been out of the brand I want for months now. Hadn't had time to do the shopping until now. While I was there and looking at stuff, I also started seriously playing with the thought of buying a netbook for travel; it just needs to be strong enough to run a browser and let me SSH into my server with minimal painfulness. And also be light and small enough that I can carry it around easily, and have a good enough battery life that I don't need to constantly be looking for a wall socket to charge it -- something like an afternoon's worth, with just a bit extra allowance to be safe. Oh, and I hope to find one with no OS installed, so I don't have to go through the extra step of uninstalling Windows.

I need to do some research on what is a good balance between price and ability -- I really really am not planning on getting fancy with it! -- but I've at least gotten a feel for the price range and range of battery life etc.

I know a couple of you have netbooks. Are they worth it? (Is there any one brand I should avoid or any one I should run to? *g*)

ANYWAY my current laptop is now at 4 gigs, up from the original 2. That, plus I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard, and, well, everything is running quite zippy. We'll see how it feels after Firefox has been on a bit, but right now, I have a virtual machine running, and I don't feel it at all -- before Snow Leopard, running a VM would slow my machine down to a crawl especially on startup and shutdown. After upgrading to Snow Leopard, running a VM was doable, but it made certain actions feel slightly hmmm, sticky/tacky.

Feeling very very very cheerful at the newfound speed ^______^ (And now and now, I'm playing with the thought of running my dev env on a virtual machine, instead of SSHing to my server. Possibilities! Maybe!)

OH and also, I'm feeling quite pleased that I managed to install the RAM myself. As much as I love software, the hardware side of things intimidates me. I always worry that I'm going to break something somehow (not entirely unjustified... the first time we had a lab in electronics, I burnt out three or four cheaps -- luckily the cheap kinds). I have tried my hardest not to have to fiddle with any hardware since. And today I installed RAM on my laptop \o/

(This is the generation of macbooks where it is easy to install RAM. But I'm still quite pleased with myself ;-))

I have a couple of wave invites. (By a couple, I mean 5). Anyone want one?

(Will probably take a day or two for them to process, etc)

ETA: Picked names out of a hat; invites gone.

[Poll #1297108]

[Poll #1165041]

My original plan was to get one year of shared hosting at Dreamhost ($9.95 a month which includes domain name, and a lot of nifty things all ready and conveniently set up). But then further conversations with Abby led me to start eying a VPS (Dreamhost offers a plan, invite-only, which adds another $15.95 per month.)

Then I talked to ciaran_h, and now I'm leaning towards taking a couple of months at Linode, the cheapest plan has $19.95 a month but I have to pay a bit extra for a domain name, since the plan doesn't come with that, so I may end up doing Linode + GoDaddy. Um, unless I choose to do a .com.ph name, but I somewhat prefer the simplicity of a .com domain.

(Oh, but Dreamhost also offers domain name. I can try there as well ^_^ I just need to figure out what the difference between the two is, if any)

Linode seems to have less convenient things set up for you, but you have root access, so more flexibility, and I find that exciting. But assuming I decide that a VPS is more than I need, Dreamhost would let me drop the VPS bit, and move back to shared hosting.

At this point, though, I may just decide to take Linode, so that I'll have more options if I ever choose to use them. It's not like I'm doing anything important with that money, anyway, and the freedom it would give me to play is tantalizing.

[Poll #1155065]

(This comes from a discussion that aveleh and I are having, because I haven't seen/read The Princess Bride, but I have both the movie and the book on hand, but started reading the book first).

We have ten 1L cartons of milk that are best before January 8, 2008 (plus one more of the same, still unopened, in the refrigerator). That gives us a bit more than a carton of milk to consume a day. I need ideas.

I've done the first three. Anyone have any suggestions for what we can do with the rest?

Fun things to do with milk

1. Drink it.
   
2. Drink it?
   
3. Drink it!
   
4. milkshake
   
5. smoothie
   
6. cereal
   
7. pudding
   
8. cheese
   
9. ice cream
   
10. pour it into someone's shoes
    
11. bathe in it
    
12. bake
    
13. make yoghurt
    
14. feed stray cats
    
15. chocolate milk
    
16. pancakes
    
17. biscuits
    
18. waffles
    
19. muffins
    
20. cakes
    
21. brownies
    
22. egg nog
    
23. try to put it back into the cow
    
24. hot chocolate
    
25. repeat Galileo's experiment
    
26. donate
    
27. special milk!facial mask
    
28. milk shampoo/conditioner
    
29. art!form (e.g. mix with paint or crushed crayons)
    
30. wash hands or feet (I dipped my finger into the last drop of milk in the glass. That counts!)
    
31. swimming pool
    
32. oreos with milk (Going to assume that this is anything + milk -- I tried a slice of honeycake in milk. Yum!)
    
33. milky way (I see stars!)
    
34. freight express to hanase
    
35. snort it up your nose
    

(This is why I shouldn't delete icons. I had one perfect for this post from Kawaii Not -- "I can't tell if I'm milk that's gone bad D: or yoghurt that $something :D" -- but I deleted it a few weeks ago)

Update
Aha! Thanks to the lovely chasethestars, I have the icon I needed. Also, I've begun adding your suggestions to the entry, and I'm bolding the stuff that I've done.

Oh interesting. If I add "&client=firefox" to the parameters in a Google search, it redirects me from http://www.google.com to http://www.google.com.ph. The navigation links at the top left hand side are different, as are the order of the search results.

Any value that starts with "firefox" will do. For example, these URLs pass me back to google.com.ph:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=firefox
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=firefox-a
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=firefoxgibberish

However, taking out the &client, or giving it a value that does not start with "firefox" does not perform the redirect. For instance:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=gibberish
http://www.google.com/search?q=aveleh&client=opera

Finally, the redirect doesn't work if I specify the country:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=aveleh&client=firefox


I wonder how it affects people in other countries? I'm guessing it will probably redirect to your country-specific Google domain.

(This all started because a search for "arno tom ponnixry" returned only results for my journal. And then we found out that searching for "aveleh" returned my journal as the fourth result in aveleh's Google search, but as the first result of mine. From there, it was a short step to me comparing both URLs for differences, and accidentally stumbling upon the auto-redirect.)

If there is a feature of LiveJournal (the software - not the business) that you would love to use but can't, or have trouble using, because it's poorly designed, confusing, unreliable, or not worth using because it makes you jump through unnecessary hoops, what is it, how do you think it should work instead, and why?