BunkBlog

Just to check on the progress of ‘s meme project, I went to the meme tracker today.

Doesn’t look like a significant number of folks linked to Liz’s Site…
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93.2 percent of Livejournal users have free accounts.
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Still popping out icons for folks over at . Want something for a userpic? I’m on a roll lately. If you’ve got a challenging morph, that would be fun…
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current_mood: chipper

Walking back from the mailbox, the boy sees a big person, who he points out as a “guy.” After being told this was, in fact, a “girl,” he decides to be a mac baby.
“Hug girl. Kisses girl.”

Oh, geez, won’t he be fun in 15 years…
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I think patchoulli perfume smells of musty rooms and old people. I can’t imagine why one would purposely wear such a scent. Am I the only one who finds patchoulli repulsive?
current_music: Nirvana – All Apologies
current_mood: tired

LizVang is a self-promoting doofus.

Not that I’ve ever enticed folks to vote for my tshirt or anything. hehe
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This Korean ad is hilarious. The small amount of speaking is irrelevant to the joke, so don’t be daunted. I’d just like to say that the Korean TV scene has obviously changed an awful lot in the 4+ years since I last was there.
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I don’t know why I bother trying to have civil adult conversations with most of the children on LiveJournal.
When someone asks a simple question that begs some clarification on one’s intent, that is not rude. When someone volunteers one’s services in support of a large event, ignoring them is rude. The list of examples could continue for days, honestly.

Let’s have a little sanity check, shall we? Before you hit the REPLY button on a post, read it carefully and try to be dispassionate. Most messages online are impersonal, not intended as a personal attack on anyone. As a corollary, when someone emails you something or replies to your post and wishes a response, give them one within a couple days. And, “er. hi” is not a response.

The term plonk, for those of you new to the specifics of online etiquette, is the sound of someone hitting a killfile. Basically, it means the conversation is over because the person on the other end is incapable of having a civil exchange of words without getting stupid and insulting.

Thank you, this has been a screed from Andy Social. We now return you to your normal programming.
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New Page of icons. Here’s a central place to view all the icons I’ve made for folks so far. I’m pretty sure the Strawberry Shortcake one was a request, but I can’t find for whom. The morphing Jack-to-Sally ones belong to as soon as she picks one of them.

Oh, and that page is freakishly slow to load on a dialup, since most of the icons are just barely under the 40k limit.
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As the kids say today, “Woot!”

We are going to have a house of our very own in a mere six weeks. woohoo!

I think we’ll be playing bocce ball in that enormous backyard or something. 🙂

Potty training is so much fun.

Not only did the boy have trouble informing me before he had to pee today, he found a way to pee the bed while not asleep. Not his bed, of course – mine. One minute he’s happily toddling along the hallway and stairs, next he’s crying on my bed while three small puddles expand. Combined with the erping-up of the other day, and he’s had plenty of clean clothes lately, although we’ve not quite gotten around to doing our own laundry…

I’m still trying to figure out how he did it. How do you make three different pee puddles on the bed, yet have only the smallest of wet spots on your own pants?

To make the evening complete, he proceeded to pee himself at dinner, not 30 seconds after I’d asked if he needed to go to the bathroom. Love potty training…

In case you didn’t know, I’ve been volunteering over at lately, making a boatload of icons for folks. If you want something weird, let me know.

Here’s the ones I’ve made so far, but they’re all spoken for (except the Gwen Stefani one).
current_music: Outback – Camberwick Green
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Rather than Black Belt or Green Belt, we’ve decided that our Six Sigma status blocks should be names. I am now Jet Li, and is Steven Seagall.
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The statistics, in more detail than you can possibly need, for my website in the month of December: right here.

Things to note: search terms for this month are skewed heavily toward XXXmas and such; the CinPics and Lianna directories combine to be more than half the bandwidth for December. Go figure.

And, for some reason I’ve got a lot of hits from Saudi Arabia, but they’re all looking at Lianna’s Christmas Archive. Perverts.

OK, there is no way I’m going to make or attempt to keep any resolutions, but here’s the quiz result anyway:

Take the What Should Your New Year’s Resolution Be? Quiz

Added a page (now gone) of holiday photos, all taken Christmas morning.

Alex was being very greedy that day, go figure.

In other news, we signed the papers today that “petition” the court for me to adopt the boy. Not sure how long until the court date and all that, but it’s one step closer. Bio-dad has never even seen this little cutie, can you imagine?
current_music: Kevin & Bean – Swallow my Eggnog

Added a long-planned new thought on my site. If you need to explain to someone why ICQ is better than MSN (or Yahoo is better than MSN, or AIM is better than MSN), I’ve listed all the good and bad of each client.

Friday –

My older sister has discovered Instant Messenging finally. Of course, her
daughter has been using it for the past year and more, but you know old people
and technology.

This newfound interest in messenging (Or "using MSN Messenger" in
her case) caused me to evaluate the various IM clients. So, here’s a quick-and-dirty
review of the Big Four: AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, and MSN Messenger (or whatever Microsoft
is calling it this week).

When I started the test, I had 65% Resources free total. I’ll let you know
what the usage of each is and how much they let go when they’re done.

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) v4.3
(62% resources after loading) –
0.9 seconds to load window, 1.2 seconds to populate window

• Features
• Seamless integration with the millions of morons…users on AOL
• Custom Icons per user, including yourself
• Remembers multiple user names and passwords
• Block users
• Save conversations as HTML
• Online alerts – global or individual (not custom per user though)
• Groups of “buddies”
• File transfers
• Limitations
  • No cam
  • Signs you up for Netscape email for some reason
  • Either on or offline or away, global settings only.
  • Closing window just signs off
• (65% free after closing)

Yahoo v5.0
(62% resources after loading) – 7.6 seconds to load window, 7.65 seconds to populate
window

• Features
  • Buddy groups
  • Offline messages
  • Webcam builtin (3% resource hit)
  • Invisible mode (global)
  • Block users
  • Option to auto-archive conversations, or manually save
  • Customizable “Away codes”
  • Links to Yahoo content (News, stocks, etc.)
  • Add personal info to profiles of buddies
  • Ignore filters
  • IMvironments
• Limitations
  • Signs up for Yahoo mail, which you can ignore
  • No individual “visibility” filter
  • The “Close” button minimizes the app only
  • Multiple users have to type in their passwords when changing over
• (65% free after closing)

ICQ 2000b
(59% resources after loading) – 6.5 seconds to load window, 11.1 seconds to populate
window

• Features
  • Dockable window
  • Personalized visibility filters
  • offline messages
  • Block users
  • Remembers multiple user names and passwords
  • Auto-archives all conversations
  • Multi-user Chat
  • Webserver
  • Hooks into other programs
  • Checks any POP3 mailboxes (multiple servers & deletion from a preview)
  • Buddy Groups (toggleable)
  • SMS, PC-PC phonecalls, file transfers
  • Customizable sounds
  • Closing window closes program
• Limitations
  • Nearly useless “find member” features
  • No built-in webcam
  • Can’t close from the tray, have to open the window
• (65% free after closing)

MSN Messenger 3.1(formerly Microsoft Messenger, soon Windows
Messenger or some darned thing)
(63%) – 4.9 seconds to load window, 4.9 seconds to populate window

• Features
  • File transfers
  • Offline messages go to email
  • Link to Netmeeting
  • Block users
  • Manually save conversations as text files
  • Customizable sounds (in Control Panel)
  • Closing window closes program
• Limitations
  • Attempts to sign you up to Hotmail
  • No built-in webcam
  • Global settings, not per-buddy
  • Users have to type usernames and passwords when changing logins
• (63% free after closing)

Let’s see what we can conclude from all this data…

The global vs. per-user functions are a pet peeve of mine, mainly because I
first started using chat clients when ICQ was the only alternative to IRC-Chat
(you newbies might call it mIRC, after the main client used to access it). Here’s
the deal with the difference: in ICQ, I can decide to be invisible, with the
caveat that some selected people can always see me. None of the other major
clients has that option, without removing people from the buddylist entirely.

The MSN client merges with the operating system in the sounds portion of the
Control Panel and when you access Hotmail via MSIE. There are good and bad things
about that, mostly bad.

The biggest things in my mind are speed and features. ICQ has the features
down, but AOL Instant Messenger is the one with the speed, both of loading and
finding your "buddies" online. MSN is next in speed, and right at
the bottom in features. Considering Microsoft’s well-known problems with privacy
and security, you may want to be careful using that one.

MSN has several unique attributes: it is the only one of the four which did not release its requested resources when exited; it is the only one which insists on keeping a task button on the toolbar, as well as the much less-obtrusive notification tray; it is the only one without groups.

Overall, each of the clients has something unique about it. Unfortunately,
since there is no standard for messenging, if you have lots of online friends
you’ll need two or more of these things to keep in touch with them all.

While the boy napped, I played with my forums.

There are now two skins available to choose from, with more as I find ones that don’t suck. There are also several languages: English, French, Spanish, Swedish, and Dutch (formal or informal options).

Next up – Klingon?

To go along with my new LJ Styles, I’ve also updated my forums with some new software. Feel free to wander over there, and please fill out the poll in the News forum.