Ten Little Chances to be Free

If you modded LiveJournal communities back in the day, please consider archiving them to Dreamwidth NOW. So much 2000s internet history lives there, and if LJ falls off the internet (as it very well might, depending on how things go in Russia in the near future), links will break and vast amounts of it will be lost. Wayback Machine only captures public posts; a Dreamwidth import can pull in locked posts and comments, and allow people to view them by joining the comm.

If you don't want to go to the hassle yourself, I will happily do it for you - just DM tenlittlebullets on DW and temporarily add 10littlebullets on LJ as a community mod. I can do it under this account, a catchall archivist account, or a specific one created just for the comm. If you want the Dreamwidth version to be co-maintained or transferred to your DW account, I can also do that.

If Dreamwidth's importer locks up, as it might if there's an archiving stampede, this Tumblr post (+reblogged mirror just in case) has instructions for exporting comments in XML format. LJ still has a built-in page that lets you do the same for posts. Dreamwidth won't let you import from these XML files, but they're still human-readable and can probably be imported to Wordpress if you want to host an archive later.

(Pre-emptive permission: Feel free to link, copy, repost, and spread this post wherever you want. Also feel free to translate it into any language you want. I would be both gratified and extremely relieved if any Russian speakers want to spread it around to people who were active on ЖЖ back in the day and are in a position to safely back up their old content; the offer to help with importing is still open, even if we have to communicate through Google Translate!)

Sometimes, with all my floofy liberal arts shit, I forget that I am a computer science major. Then somebody asks me to fix their computer and I give the usual spiel about how CS isn't all programming and programming isn't directly applicable to navigating the idiosyncracies of a junkware-ridden WinXP box, then agree to do it anyway. Because I cannot resist puppy eyes, because I enjoy solving problems, and because if I fix it somebody will owe me a drink.

50% of garden-variety "hey you're a CS major can you fix it" computer problems can be solved by this xkcd strip. Lots of things that are more technical--in this case, weird driver software that was trying to control the wireless configuration--can be solved by looking up obscure error codes instead of flailing at them, reading program documentation, and using process of elimination to isolate the problem.

Then I remember that this is how debugging in general works.

Then I remember the old chestnut that 90% of your time is spent debugging 10% of your code, and I facepalm as I realize that programming is applicable to navigating the idiosyncracies of a junkware-ridden WinXP box. Not in the sense of YOU ARE TECHIE YOU MAGICALLY KNOW HOW TO MAKE IT WORK, but in the sense that programming is, in and of itself, a crash course in troubleshooting Shit What's Fucked Up. And honestly, I think I'd take a junkware-ridden WinXP box over a steaming heap of badly-written Java any day of the week. Especially if somebody owes me a steaming cup of well-made java when I'm done.

This is now my official, Ol' Vic-approved mental image of Enjolras. (NSFW if W disapproves of hot Roman ass. It's educational, really!)

I am incredibly tempted to buy a HP Mini-Note laptop. Because it's $550, probably smaller than most of the books I've read lately, and still has decent screen resolution/memory/hard disk space. And for serious, if I bought it direct from HP, I could get an extra gig of RAM and a laptop case loaded with goodies still for under $700.

Today I ended up working a completely dead closing shift without my computer, so to keep myself from dying of boredom I bought a trashy romance novel when I went to grab food. I have actually never read a trashy romance novel, unless you count certain egregiously bad fanfic, and now I kind of wish I'd bought a magazine instead. Because after fifty pages of our Fiery Regency Heroine endlessly repeating "Scoundrel! Blackguard! Oh, how I despise you! I shall never give in to your--say, is that Eau de Brooding Antihero you're wearing? ....villain!" I got bored and skipped to the sex scenes. And wow, what a waste of five bucks.