So I've discovered a few new geeky toys that I've been having fun with recently.

The first toy is Pandora, and I discovered this a few weeks back. I'm already almost out of free hours this month (you get 40 free hours per month). I'm sure this website has been out for awhile now but apparently I am slow to get with the program! I have fun listening to this while I am working instead of my iTunes playlist. So far on Pandora I have three different "stations": Muse, Linkin Park, and Apocalyptica. The Linkin Park station ended up playing a lot of Nickelback, which was good because apparently I like a lot of their music.

I submitted a "music request" to Pandora for them to add Yuki Kaijura. They actually responded to my email, but they didn't really give me a direct "yes" or "no" to my request. They did say that they're working on getting more "world" music included, instead of just U.S. music, but that it's an enormous task. So, maybe I'll see her on there one day!

The next toy that I've been playing with recently is my new (to me) refurbished MacBook Pro! It is two years old, and I received it as a birthday present from Rob a few days ago. This is my first Mac, so I keep running into things that I don't know how to do, but I'm learning. It's set up to dual boot both MacOS and Windows XP. I had to replace Pidgin with Adium and Crimson Editor with TextWrangler -- haven't really tried out TextWrangler yet, but Adium is very nice.

One thing that has been driving me nuts is that my sound keeps muting itself. I haven't been able to figure out the exact cause yet. First I thought it was doing it on every reboot, then I thought it was doing it after every sleep, so I changed my system settings so that the computer would never go to sleep. But I'm still having my sound randomly mute. Argh.

Any general Mac advice from Mac users would be welcomed! I'm definitely still a newbie at this so I can use all the help I can get.

The next toy that I've been playing with I just discovered today. I was looking for a RSS reader because I constantly have a ton of tabs open in Firefox just to keep up with various websites: LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, CNN, Consumerist, OneManga, and MMO Champion. I was also following Slashdot through both LiveJournal and Twitter and felt that it was a little redundant. I'm trying out Google Reader now. It won't follow my LiveJournal, Facebook, or Twitter page, but it'll take care of mostly everything else.

I'm subscribing to CNN, Consumerist, OneManga, MMO Champion, Slashdot, The Dagger (Harford County news), and Matt Cutts' blog (for work purposes). Any other good weblogs/RSS feeds that I should add?

Lastly, I'm trying out the delicious bookmark service, but so far I don't like it. I wanted to try it so that I could sync the bookmarks across my desktop and laptop. I imported my bookmarks from my laptop, and it turned all of my folders into tags, which would be fine, except I had a lot of subfolders within folders. So for example, I had a World of Warcraft folder, with subfolders for each class (Druid, Priest, and so on) as well as subfolders for things like Armory Tools, and Professions. Now when I view the World of Warcraft tag/folder, it shows not only the bookmarks that were in the initial folder, but also the subfolders, leaving me with a gigantic list of bookmarks to search through.

I'm wondering if maybe I just need to live with it and maybe re-tagging things will help, or if I need a different system, or maybe I should just stick to keeping bookmarks on my own hard drive.

So those are all the toys that I can think of that I've been playing with recently!

Hmm... to try out Google Chrome or not. I probably will, as much as I love Firefox. I haven't found a Google product that I didn't like.

So I have discovered a site that is new to me at least: Flickpeek.com. It seems to have a lot of streamed videos available, including full anime episodes. Assuming this isn't a trap of some kind, I now have access to a lot of anime that I didn't before. Any recommendations as to what I should watch next?

So after the whole Basic Account debacle, LiveJournal has just announced that they are adding a new type of account: Sponsored. Sponsored will have the same features as a Paid account, but will have certain types of ads on it.

...so wait, they removed Basic Accounts because their three types of accounts were confusing, and now they are adding another type of account? Now we have accounts that are ad-free, have ads, or have sponsored ads? Okay...

I should probably re-make my own weblog soon. I'll keep cloning posts here because Friends pages are so convenient. I wonder if it's worth porting all of my posts that are here to the weblog.

LiveJournal - We Know Drama.

Apparently yesterday, March 12, 2008, SUP, the owner of LiveJournal, took the ability to make new Basic Accounts away. Basic Accounts are accounts with minimal features but no ads -- the same type of account that I use. They changed this without announcing it on any sort of news feed; they quietly noted in their FAQ that new users would no longer be able to create Basic Accounts and that was about it. Brad, the original creator of LiveJournal, who now serves on LiveJournal's Advisory board noted and opposed this change. The VP of Product Development responded to him with this:

From a product perspective it was more about creating a new registration process that was easier for new users to understand. I'm sure it's been ages since many of you signed up for an account, but it was quite confusing and included a table of options that was not very inviting to new users.

For new users to the site, the options of either having an ad-supported journal or the option to pay $20 annually for more (2GB) photo storage, more userpics, and ad-controls seems like a much simpler and easy to understand work-flow. We are working hard to add even more features and are currently revisiting our ad-supported strategy to find ways to deliver more user value in a way that isn't crass.

So basically, they took away the ability to create Basic Accounts entirely because creating an account was confusing for new users. YARITE. If that were the case there would still be a way to make a new Basic Account somewhere.

Today, after people noticed what they had done, they owned up to it and actually announced it on News. Somehow I guess they weren't expecting people to notice the change.

I'm not too pleased about this turn of events. I used to have a paid account, but went back to a basic account after awhile. SUP could eventually someday decide to turn basic accounts into Plus accounts -- accounts with ads. I don't want that; I'd sooner remake my blog elsewhere than have ads on it.

Tech trio seeks market for new game

Rob (and two friends of mine) got interviewed for the Roanoke Times :).

Well, it seems like talk of the LiveJournal events has died down, although it's still very much on my mind. It may seem silly to some to worry about something like this, but I will tell you why I am still concerned. LiveJournal/SixApart still has yet to address what we are and are not allowed to post in our LiveJournals and what we are and are not allowed to list as interests. They still have not addressed why they seemingly changed their own TOS without telling their userbase and then issued suspensions based on the new TOS that no one had (or still has) access to. I want to know why you can be suspended for listing something as an interest when you don't necessarily support it, you are merely interested in it, hence the word "interest." If I have the "Holocaust" listed as an interest, it doesn't mean I support it, all it means is that I am interested in it. LiveJournal/SixApart has yet to address this, and I will continue to be concerned about it until they do.

Brad Fitzpatrick, creator of LiveJournal, apparently no longer works for LiveJournal. This is in conflict to what the Barak, the CEO of Six Apart said, which was Brad is on vacation, and he is filling in his absence.

This makes me feel uneasy. So apparently, and I am probably making incorrect assumptions, but it seems Brad left the company quietly, and now this Barak fellow is the one calling the shots. This time, he called them rather poorly. I am kind of afraid for LiveJournal's future. Brad really did a good job with it, and I liked his vision for LiveJournal. I'm not sure I like the Six Apart vision of LiveJournal. Six Apart has really commercialized LiveJournal and now feels it needs to cater to the advertisers rather than its users. That is completely unlike Brad's original vision of LiveJournal, which was community-centered and ad-free.

Let me say again that the last paragraph is full of assumptions, and is probably full of inaccuracies. Just wanted to say that before anyone crucified me. :P

It's too bad. Even if LiveJournal is going in a direction I don't like, it still is the best weblogging website out there. If I were to leave LiveJournal, the only real option for me would be to remake my weblog on birdangel.net.

I wasn't really sure where to link the image, so I picked the link that seems to have the most thorough write-up on the topic. Basically, LiveJournal is mass suspending any LiveJournals and communities that have illegal sexual activities listed in their interests, including incest, pedophilia, lolita, yaoi, and others. LiveJournal appears to not be investigating said journals or communities before they are suspended, as legitimate journals and communities have been victims of this mass banning.

Such journals and communities include people who have been victims of said illegal sexual activities, because they have those activities listed in their interests in an attempt to find others who are victims. Also, many fandom communities have been deleted because they list yaoi, lolita, or others in their interests list, because they are fans of media that include such things in the media, but the fans do not necessarily support the activities themselves. Communities about the novel Lolita have been banned, and I am under the impression that this novel is about a character who discovers that lolita is immoral (correct me if I am wrong).

I find the whole matter saddening and I hope LiveJournal reverses their stance, and restores legitimate accounts to be unbanned.

I know of at least two people who are addicted to Facebook. They are so addicted that both of them have terminated their Facebook accounts. I am really puzzled by this. I log onto Facebook maybe once every two weeks at most. I check for messages, new pictures, and friend requests. My news feed is mostly comprised of "So and so has joined such and such group," and I have absolutely no interest in finding out what new group Johnny has joined. Maybe it's because I only have 25 people friended on Facebook, so I'm just not getting enough data through my news feed.

On the other side, I can completely understand how one could be addicted to LiveJournal. LiveJournal is fascinating. You actually get to read posts people write. I like reading what people write. People don't really write posts on Facebook. It's literally a repository of pictures, group names, and friend invites. How is that interesting? The only real interesting thing there are the photo galleries. Photos are interesting. Group names, not so much. Don't get me wrong, Facebook is extremely useful, such as for getting contact information. But you don't constantly need to check Facebook for contact info. You just get it when you need it.

I am still working on hand-importing all of my old Pita entries. It is very tedious. I found out that even after I finish posting all of those entries, I am going to be missing a block of weblog entries during the time that I was on birdangel.net using Greymatter. So I am going to have to dig out an old backup of birdangel.net's database and find a way to get the old entries out of it, whether it is digging through the huge file itself or uploading the database to the current birdangel.net and doing something with it there.

I found out there is a way to list your LiveJournal tags in your sidebar, so I am happy about that. I'm kind of surprised no one pointed it out to me, actually. If anyone else besides me didn't know how to do it, this is how. Go to Journal - > Edit Journal Style in the LiveJournal menu. Click on the Custom Options tab, and on that page, go to the Sidebar link. Scroll down and you should see the question, "Show tags in the sidebar? Yes/No." Choose Yes. You can choose to display your tags as a list or as a cloud. My cloud looked pretty cluttered, so I picked list, even though it is a long list.

Aside from listing your tags in the sidebar, another way you can display them publicly is through the URL http://yourjournalname.livejournal.com/tag/. My tag list is here. I was very pleased that LiveJournal is smart enough to not display tags in the list if all of the entries with that tag are friends-locked. You can only see the tag in the list if you are friended, and thus can view those entries.

So I'm slowly making progress towards making my LiveJournal into a real weblog. My sidebar is starting to fill up. I think my next project will be new icons. I only have the two new ones that I have been using constantly. I need more variety. I'm thinking that I need a new "happy" icon and I need a WoW icon. I actually already tried making a WoW icon, but I couldn't get the filesize small enough (it was animated).

I returned to Blacksburg Friday night. Since both Rob and I were exhausted from all the wedding planning this past week, we spent Saturday and Sunday just chilling. I played WoW on Sunday and dinged level 70 on my druid. Yes, I said I was going to give WoW up until I got a job, but I really ran out of things to do that weren't WoW. Also, Rob said I could play. So in lieu of giving up WoW entirely, I have majorly cut back on my playtime. So far, this has worked out well.

Another thing I did this weekend was finish tagging all of my LiveJournal posts. Yes, all of them. Yes, I am crazy. Today I have started to manually post entries from my Pita blog days. I am hoping that once I get all of the Pita entries into LiveJournal, I will have all of my weblog posts ever written on here. However, I may be missing a few from when I was using b2 but not the b2-to-LiveJournal plugin. If that is the case, I should have birdangel.net's database backed up and it should be possible to get the missing entries. It's just going to be a pain.

I've decided that LiveJournal will be my weblog from now on. At this point, I don't have any plans to re-create A Bird's Melody at birdangel.net. LiveJournal just makes blogging easier than if I have to manage it myself. On LiveJournal, I don't have to worry about spam-bots. I can use pretty icons. I can use any layout I wish (if I return to a paid account). And last but not least, I can friends-lock posts. This is the most important point.

On a weblog on birdangel.net, it would be very hard to make entries that are private that some people can see. Using the Wordpress system, you could assign a password to an entry, but then you need to give the password to every single person that you want to be able to view the entry. On LiveJournal, you can either set the security setting to Public (everyone can view it), Friends only (only people on your friends list can view it), Private (only you can view it), or a custom setting (only a certain group of your Friends can view it).

Previously, I did not care very much about making friends-locked entries. My philosophy was that I am an honest person, and I have nothing to hide. I posted accordingly. But since I have gotten older, and I have been trying to get into the working world, I have started caring a little more about what I have made public. I have realized, begrudgingly, that posts that contain information about the place where I work really need to not be public. I have realized that posts where I complain about certain people need to be not public, lest they find out and confront me about it.

I am not going to change this weblog to a friends-only weblog, but I am going to be more careful about what entries are public and which are not. As such, I may need to friend more people in order to allow them access to friends-only entries. I really wish LiveJournal had a built in system of distinguishing "Friends" from "Bloggers that you read, but whom you are not necessarily friends with," "Bloggers that are allowed to read your locked entries, but whom you are not interested in reading," and "Bloggers that really are my friends." If you would like reading access to my locked entries and I do not have you friended, please reply to this post saying as such and I will consider your request.

Since this will be my weblog from now on, I am setting up shop. I finally changed the layout (the colors were starting to bug me). I am working on phasing out my old icons and bringing in new ones. As I mentioned before, I may switch to a paid account should I start wanting it. Right now, I am not even using all of my available icon slots. Also, I am too lazy to code my own layout. These may be things that I want in the future, however.

I am also working on tagging all the old entries. One of my one old complaints about LiveJournal was that I couldn't put entries into categories, but they added that feature at some point. The one feature that seems to be missing is a list of tags that I am using. I want to put a Tags List in my sidebar, but there doesn't seem to be an automatic way of doing that. I could hand-code the list myself, but that seems like a temporary solution, especially if I add new tags.

I need some help. I used to use Nero for burning CDs and DVDs in my old computer, and it worked great. However, my burner died, and I got a new computer for my birthday with a new burner. I installed my old version of Nero, but it didn't support the new burner. So I got the latest version of Nero, and I hate it. It's huge and bloated. It seems to want to do everything, and it takes over your computer. A Nero Agent opens up at startup, Nero becomes integrated with Windows Media Player, oh, it is tons of "fun." Every time I open Windows Media Player a Nero pop-up box pops up that I have to click on to make it go away.

My free trial of Nero ran out, so now I am looking for new burning software. Can you tell me what you guys use and if it is good? I just want good CD DVD burning software, just with the burning feature, I don't want "Nero Music Player" and all this other stuff. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So is Facebook the new LiveJournal? I can use my Facebook homepage just like my Friends page when people post Notes. Kinda cool. Right now it's not redundant because most of my friends on Facebook are not on LiveJournal, but I'm wondering when it's going to start overlapping.

Facebook has some nice features that LiveJournal doesn't have, too, like being able to upload photo albums. I haven't taken advantage of that feature because I have no recent photographs of me, but it is still a nice feature.

Today my mother and I visited 1.15 bridal gown stores (we were only at the second one for about 20 minutes before it had to close, so it doesn't fully count). I tried on six gowns and I liked two of them. We still have a lot of stores to go to and I have a lot more gowns to try on. I haven't found a gown yet that screams "ME!" but I'm sure that I need to visit more stores first before I find that gown.

This evening we worked on the guest list. There are 66 people listed so far, and I don't have Rob's list of family yet. It's interesting to observe who my mother wants to invite. For instance, we have to invite brothers and sisters of my maternal grandparents and their children, but for some reason, we aren't inviting siblings of my paternal grandmother. This is probably because we are closer to the former rather than the latter, but I wonder why that is.

Since I worked so hard on wedding stuff today, I figured I deserved a break and I tried to play some Warcraft. However, my laptop is being spastic again. So I have a problem to present to all you computer-minded people. Games are very laggy on my laptop. I get between 1-4 frames per second and 4 is at its best. I have tried upgrading the memory and hard drive. I've tried playing games with very little running in the background. I've tried playing WoW with no addons enabled. I've tried playing WoW on minimal video settings (such as background depth, etc). I've searched my laptop for viruses and spyware. I've reformatted my laptop. I have all the most recent updates to Windows and my graphics card. The speed of my CPU is 2.60GHz and I have 1GB of RAM. Rob and I are completely baffled as to the cause of my lag. Any other input would be appreciated.

So I'm finally trying to kick my addiction of World of Warcraft. For the time being I'm not letting myself play the game at all, not until I get some things taken care of. These things are mostly organizing my stuff: computer files and all my other junk. So far I've burned quite a bit of anime to DVD, clearing off about 60GB of space off my hard drive. There are two series that I am prevented from burning because they're incomplete: Beck, which I mentioned yesterday, and Marimite. If anyone has Marimite Spring DVD Special 4 and is willing to share, let me know. No one is seeding the torrent atm. I also somehow managed to lose my burnt DVD of PGSM episodes 39-49 and the specials, sigh, so I'm working on redownloading them. Luckily, they're still being seeded. I think what I did is I accidentally sent Nate my only copy of episodes 39-49 and then forgot to make myself a copy. Oops!

I'm also trying to organize my music collection. Most of the MP3s needed their ID3 tags fixed because they were either missing or they didn't all match with other similiar MP3s. In the process, I'm separating my music collection into music that is on my iPod, and music that is not. All the music on my iPod finally has working ID3 tags. It's nice ^_^. I'm up to 974 songs that have correct ID3 tags. Only 2000 songs more to go! :P I now have all my CDs that I own all ripped to MP3 and on my iPod. I still need to organize all my burned CDs, CDs that I still need to burn, and THEN I have the fun job of sorting through all the MP3s that are just loosely sitting in a folder. Weeee.

After I'm done all of THAT (yay) I still have other computer files to go through, like my website files. I know I said awhile back that I wanted to put it back up and I didn't follow through, but if I'm not allowing myself to log onto WoW, I have nothing else to do! =P So hopefully I will get something up.

I also still need to organize all my other stuff, I'm slowly moving all my stuff to Rob's apartment since I have to move out at the end of July, and I really need to organize. I have a plastic bag full of "important" papers that I really need to go through and sort, not to mention drawers full of clothes and other things. I'm hoping I can get rid of a lot of stuff that I don't need.

Speaking of clothes, none of my shirts fit! It's been really making me feel self conscious to have my stomach exposed since I'm too fat for my shirts, so I am going on my first diet. I've never had to before since I had such a good metabolism, but it looks like that wasn't meant to last :(. I currently weigh 133.5lbs and I want to get back to 115-120lbs so that I don't look like a fattie in my wedding dress when I get married. That means I need to lose the weight in about a month, since that's when I will start looking at wedding dresses and getting fitted. What I'm doing for a diet is I am only eating lunch, dinner, and sometimes breakfast. I'm not allowing myself any snacks. Also, for lunch and dinner I am trying to eat healthier than cheeseburgers. Rob's helping with that by taking me to Subway where I happily eat turkey and ham with yummy red wine vinegrette. Hurray!

Well basically between the diet and the no playing WoW I am depriving myself of the two things I enjoy most: food and WoW. Yay deprivation! ;_; AHH I MISS FOOD I WANT TO EAT SOMETHING. AND I WANT TO GO INTO WOW AND SMITE THINGS. PAM SMASH!

I currently have three email addresses that I actively check. I have my school email address, which I give out to anything VT related, anything that needs to not have a BA.net email (such as domain registration, hosting accounts), and some real life people. I have a BA.net email that I do not post online anywhere so that I can protect it from spam and I give that out to real life friends and I've started giving it to online friends who directly ask me for my email and not just get it off my profile or website. Then I have my other BA.net email address, which is what I use for mostly anything that asks me for an email address, it's the one I have posted on my profiles and websites, and so on and so forth. That one gets spammed to death, most likely because it is posted on my websites.

I want to abandon that email address, since it's in all the spammer's lists. I have done this before with my old email address, loveprincess@birdangel.net. That email address doesn't even exist anymore, actually, since I did not recreate the account when I switched hosts. My problems are twofold: one, I don't know where all I have posted my current email address, so I don't know where all I need to change it. I'm not that concerned about this, because I have done this before. I'll gradually switch everything over, and after awhile anything that still has my old email address I probably don't use anymore anyway, so it'll be safe to stop checking the old email account.

My other problem is that I don't know what new email to make. Obviously it'll be at birdangel.net, please don't try to convince me to use Gmail or anything like that. I just can't think of a username that I like. Silly me. So if you have any suggestions, I'd like to hear them. Please don't comment with "Use whatever@birdangel.net!" cause then the spambots will be able to find it. Say something like "Use the username 'whatever'" or "Use 'whatever@DIESPAMDIIIIEbirdangel.net." Obviously I'm already using the username birdangel, and I've also used loveprincess in the past. I don't want to make the username 'webmaster' or 'webmistress' because I feel like spammers might guess those. I don't want to say the current username that I protect from spam, just in case the spammers are watching. Yes, I am paranoid.

Oh, and I'd also like to hear suggestions on keeping the new email address safe from spam. How do you advertise your email address to legitimate people without spammers getting ahold of it, and that kind of thing.

Thanks ^_^

[cloned from A Bird's Melody]

At last, my break has arrived. Finally I will be able to operate freely without having to wake up for class every day. Granted, I have schoolwork to do, but at least I will not have the time constraints that I do when I have class. Ahhh, how us VT students have longed for this break. Since we get no days off between the beginning of the semester and the beginning of Thanksgiving break, by the time the week before Thanksgiving rolls around, we have reached our breaking point, stressed to oblivion. I love VT, but we really need a fall break earlier in the semester.

So I'm going to relax! Bwee. And I hope to get stuff done that's not class-related, like cleaning out my email and stuff. Organizing is fun. ^_^

A note: My AIM screenname "the bird angel" isn't working for me right now. I'm currently on the screenname "Pam Schoffstall" if you're looking for me.

Edit, 2:52am: Okay, so apparently that screenname isn't working anymore either. What is going on O.o. I tried out two other screennames and they work, but I just lost my buddy list on the one. What is going on. Anyway, uh... just don't try to contact me on AIM if you don't see me. ^_^;

Awhile back I made three icons that happened to feature lyrics from the Yuki Kajiura song "Cynical World." As I was listening to this song in my car I got ideas for more icons for other lines in the song, so I decided to make a PGSM icon songset. That is, it's a set of PGSM icons featuring all the lines in this song. Hope you enjoy ^_^. Please comment and tell me if you like them or if you think they stink. Feel free to take any and use them on LiveJournal or message boards, and you don't need to credit me. Please don't repost these on any other website or LiveJournal, though.

My favorites:


( the songset )