According to quite a few people on LJ, they have broken it completely and the world is ending. Or something of that magnitude. It turns out that the bits they changed that I don't like, can be fixed by turning on customised comment pages. So I have now gone from hating them to liking them. Of course the difference is that I hate other people's because 90% of them are unreadable, whereas mine are by definition perfect. And red - you can't go wrong with red.

The trouble with this is that when I customised my layout (and made it less red, but now the red stands out nicely) I didn't bother with anything to do with customised comment pages because I wouldn't need them... 45 minutes later I've managed to change the text to a readable size, rather than a slightly too small to read comfortably size. And changed the border colour. At which point I had to stop and do other things, but I was having fun. Frustrating fun because it's hard to find what LJ has called its CSS elements. But it's better than doing similar things at work because here I can what I like, I'm the only person I have to please, and I don't have to have it done by Tuesday in five minute bits in between dealing with all the other work that needs doing.

So over Christmas, as well as installing Linux Mint on my old netbook and putting a new hard drive in my current one, I am also going to be playing with LJ CSS and a few things that need doing on WP. I have ten days off in a row (including weekends and bank holidays), I need something to do with that time and I've been thinking I need something like that to do, but there's only so many times you can change your layout.

I am trying to be back in the real world after a long weekend at the windmill. It was fun, apart from the earwigs in the windmill, the ticks on the walks and the stinging nettles (I got stung, but no ticks - after seeing them on the cat I think I prefer the stinging nettles).

I ended up reactivating my Facebook account (I never completely deleted it because I didn't trust them to delete my data). After the end of Rotaract dinner with people I hadn't seen for years I thought I really ought to keep up with them. And then at the windmill there were people I hadn't seen for a year, so I knew nothing of what had happened to them during that time, but they all knew about each other.

So I ended up going back on Facebook. It looks like I can see all status updates on TweetDeck and post from TweetDeck and I am assured that these days emails to say you have a message tell you what the message is. So I shouldn't have to actually go to Facebook itself. But it is purely a real life thing - I only have Rotaractors and people I knew at uni on there (plus Emma who is the only person from school I still talk to).

And then after that I got curious about Google+. So I used my netbook, where I'm trying out Firefox 4.0. I found that it's much easier to change the privacy settings on Google+ than Facebook. And that's the only thing I've done on either of them really. I don't intend to use Google+ for anything, not least because it seems to have chosen one of my Gmail accounts to associate with my Googld+ account. Which isn't a bad choice, but I wish it had warned me in advance.

On the topic of old friends, I'm off to London this afternoon to meet livii - and shinyjenni and sillycleo too. It's been very handy having people come here, when I can't go anywhere. This year I've also seen selenay936, hhertzof, just_ann_now and munditia and I've only had to go as far as Coventry and London.

Tomorrow I have to go on a first aid refresher course. I've been on a couple before, so I know where it is, but I was never the one driving. This time I'm going on my own. If I was going there from where I used to live, it would be fine. If I was going there not during rush hour it would be fine. However, the main route there gets really busy at rush hour and is best avoided - everyone I know who goes in that direction at rush hour goes the back way.

I have been the back way, as a passenger, a long time ago, in the dark, when I didn't really know the area.

I already knew how the route started, which is something. I looked it up on Google and it suggested the back way as an alternative, which is a good start. So then I followed my route on streetmap. Which got a bit confusing with sudden changes of weather and times when I went too far and then ended up facing the wrong way. But I eventually ended up at the edge of town, which I recognised. Despite the fact that it somehow jumped from one road to another. I retracted my steps and found the turning was where I thought it was.

There are a lot of places round here where getting there mostly just involves getting on one road and staying on it. Which is how this route is to start with - I just then have to keep an eye on the signs and turn off it. But I at least know now the junction is by the 30mph sign (or was when Google photographed it). After that I keep going to the end of the road twice more, and then just follow the signs. So hopefully it'll all work out... If I do miss the one turning, I just take a detour through another village, so I should end up where I intend to.

My plans for the last week and a bit were derailed by waking up the Sunday before last really dizzy without me having done anything to set it off. So I've done an awful lot of nothing at all recently. Well, except for watching all of Make it or Break it, for which I blame jedinic.

But it was the perfect thing for when I had no brain. I do have a secret love of teen dramas, although usually high school based ones. This one's just the same, only centred round gymnastics. It's completely OTT drama-wise, but that's what I like about it.I can forgive some of the gymnastics for not making sense (it helps not to think about it), but I can't forgive Sasha for saying he won an Olympic gold for England, as that's impossible and I can't believe that none of the writers or the actor (who's English) spotted that.

The characters took a while to grow on me, but Sasha (who's a bloke and played by an Englishman - I'm still not sure whether the character is Romanian or English) started a teasing relationship with Summer and then he became my favourite character. He's also the hero-type, which hhertzof pointed out are the ones that tend to be my favourites.

Fortunately just before I was dizzy my Gmail account got hacked. Gmail spotted it and stopped the emails from going out, but I did then spend a whole day changing all my passwords. Some of them are a nightmare to find where to change, some of them just didn't work and I ended up emailing to get them changed. I now have more passwords and more secure passwords than I did (I should have changed them long ago really). Some of them are so secure it takes me a few attempts to log in while I fail to remember what they are.

My friends' wedding was on Saturday, which was good. The actual ceremony felt never-ending and was really boring (seriously, it was 45 minutes and it only took 2 minutes to actually marry them), but it was good to talk to people I hadn't seen for ages. The official photographer took a picture of all the Rotaractors and that must have been at least half the people there. I definitely established that the whole thing isn't for me - that would be my idea of hell making such a big deal of it and being the centre of attention and all the formalities you have to do. The only part I like is getting to see all your friends at the reception.

This afternoon we sat down to listen to the tennis we taped last night... and discovered it had rained in New York so they hadn't played. So now we need to listen to it tonight and tomorrow instead (depending on when they finish and if it rains).

So with the afternoon I suddenly had free, I re-did my LJ layout. It's less red, although I think it looks more red. It's all a bit academic anyway because the only people who will ever see it are people looking at my actual LJ, and me when I come across an unreadable one.

I also discovered the layout I have for Dreamwidth now has a sidebar on the left variant, which I've wanted ever since the layout existed. So now I have that. It's also red, suffice to say.

Since people are suddenly talking about Dreamwidth, I'll mention where I am. I write my posts in my blog, which automatically cross-posts them into my LJ: paranoidangel42 and my DW journal: paranoidangel. You're welcome to read or post in any of those three, I don't mind. But if you're reading by RSS then I would read the blog's RSS (or Atom) feed because it has more useful stuff in it.

Since I read by RSS, I don't care whether I read people's LJ or DW - unless one of them doesn't allow me to see full posts. So if anyone is crossposting to both and would prefer me to comment in one, then I can just change my link and I'll never notice the difference.

I am in need of recs of blogs/LJs/communities to follow. Anything with an RSS/atom feed counts, as does Twitter. I am sure there is some interesting stuff out there that I am rubbish at finding for myself.

Any feed with titles only or partial doesn't count because I can't read that without putting in effort. Anyone who posts to Twitter a lot also doesn't count because TweetDeck only picks up the last 200 tweets and I only read Twitter in the evenings when I put my main laptop on.

I haven't updated a while. First I didn't have time and then I didn't want to catch up and then I got dizzy... But these are all the things I might have posted about had I got round to it sometime in the last couple of weeks: Read more...

I've been meaning to make some more multi-character icons for a while. Then today LJ announced that you can buy 5 more userpic spaces for £1.20 for a year and all of a sudden I can have three more and don't have to find two to take out. And can carry on using one.

So I now have six icons with three characters of the same name on. There aren't any bonus points for being able to name them all - not least because I don't think there's anyone reading this that will know which series all of these characters come from. And if you're looking at this on DW they have an extra field on the icons page that will tell you all the surnames of the people pictured.

But I felt the need to display the set: Read more...

I'm going for a theme with my LJ icons. Also, it makes them multi-use. I did one a while ago with Harry Sullivan, Harry Pearce and Harry Potter:

Now I've done Jack Meadows, Jack O'Neill and Jack Harkness:

and Sam Carter, Sam Gamgee and Sam Beckett:

My week off means posting more often, now that I have nothing better to do apart from watch tennis. And do all the other things I need to get done this week (Yuletide, Ch secret santa, baking, Rotaract stuff...).

I got to thinking last night about how people use their journals/blogs mostly because I keep coming across people who use it completely different to me.

Personally, I post everything in my blog (which is so much better to post to than the LJ/DW interface) and have a plug-in that crossposts to Livejournal and Dreamwidth, so people who want to read on those sites rather than by RSS feed can do so. On the extremely rare occasion I post something I don't want the whole world to see (which is usually a rant about something/something specific and I don't want them to happen upon it), then I password protect it on my blog and friends lock it on my LJ and DW. Anyone can ask for the password and if you look back in my blog carefully enough (or use the search, it's pretty good) you can find the password.

When it comes to reading, I read everything, no matter what site it's on, by RSS Feed. It means I don't see LJ cuts and I can mark things as unread if I haven't got time to read them at the moment. Or I can mark things as read without reading them if I know I'm not interested or know I'm not going to get time to read. I also don't have to try and remember where I got to, like you do on the LJ friends page.

My LJ friends list is a copy of all the people I'm reading by RSS Feed. If I stop reading I take them off and if I start reading I add them on. I never use filters because I personally feel like that's lying to people about whether you're reading them or not. I sort of expect other people to do the same thing - so if they have me friended then they're reading me, and it annoys me when they defriend me the minute I defriend them - it feels as if they're too much of a coward to take me off their list before I do.

Dreamwidth is a bit different because on that one I allow access to everyone that has friended me on LJ but i haven't friended back. That way they can see my friends entries, but I'm not reading their journal, and they know I'm not. I am subscribed to a few people on DW that I'm not on LJ because they're the ones I'm occasionally interested in reading and I read my DW list on the site every few days ish. Course, that system falls down rather a lot because a lot of people have accounts at DW but aren't posting there.

To conclude: My LJ friends list is nothing more than a reading list and the word friend is a misnomer.

So, how do you use yours?*

*I know it's not Easter, but I haven't had a Cadbury's Creme Egg since 2004 and I don't watch adverts

This is really hacking me off now and I can't find the answer, only lots of people complaining that you can't turn Gmail's threading off.

I have random emails that aren't being threaded at all. And other random ones that only thread if I keep the previous emails unread. Sometimes. This is in my RPG account, so most of the emails I have are LJ notifications. None of the non-LJ emails I get have this problem, but there are so few of them it's hard to be sure.

I haven't had this at all in the nearly two years I've had this Gmail account and I can't even work out a pattern of why it's happening. Someone please tell me they've got the same problem and it's not just me? Or someone tell me they know the solution, which would be even better. It's just really driving me round the bend.

Gmail's help tells me that sometimes it doesn't thread emails properly, which is basically a catch-all for anything that might have buggered up so they don't have to deal with it.

It's been an... uneven week this week I think. But I am up to 2000 words in my Sarah & Harry ficathon fic and the high single digits in my first head exercise - which is a big improvement on the two I could manage at the weekend.

I discovered my freeserve account has been deleted. I was about to say it was my first email account, but it wasn't, because we first had a general family one, that's now just dad's, and my second was my uni one. And the third. So it was my fourth email address in fact. I've had rather a lot since then...

It's no good to me anymore anyway, since all I get on it is spam (which I had Gmail filter for me anyway) and I only used it for dial-up access. But Zen, who provide my ADSL, also give you a dial-up account, so I can just use that.

I also haven't logged into my Gateworld account for a while, so all the emails will have been deleted and I'll let it delete my account as well, I think. I just used it as a spam trap, so all that happened was that it was full of spam.

These days I filter my main email account through Gmail, so it gets spam checked twice and I rarely get any. Although Gmail likes to randomly decide emails are spam, which is less than helpful... And it would also be nice if hotmail and yahoo would believe my email address isn't spam. It seems to be universally hated by both of them, which is really annoying.

Wimbledon starts on Monday! I have my fantasy team assembled, which includes Federer and Murray and an assortment of women who's names I liked, since I know nothing about the women and don't care about them either. I must remember to find my radio from wherever I put it when I moved in six months ago.

After deleting my Facebook account it started sending me notifications. So I had to undelete it to find out what was going on and found that not only had it ticked every notification box but it had also allowed my profile to be seen by everyone! So I reset it, but now I don't trust them to actually delete it, even though it looks as thought they do now, so I haven't. But after fixing all that I see no reason to ever visit the site again.

I had an epiphany about Twitter too and what I actually wanted to use it for. There's loads of people I follow who I'm just not reading and who aren't following me so we can't have a conversation over it and when they post interesting stuff I want to ask about, I can't ask on Twitter. So I have temporarily shunted everyone I don't think I want to read into a column and I'll see if I miss them, or if they've said anything I do want to read in a few days time. But I did discover there's a Wimbledon feed, which is vaguely interesting. There are also feeds for various courts and Henman Hill! Tim Henman has an account he rarely posts to but interesting, Andy Roddick has one that he uses and posts interesting things to as far as I can see. Unlike Andy Murray...

I am looking forward to melliyna coming to visit on Wednesday because I want to see her, but also because it'll be someone to talk to. Blogs and Twitter aren't really the best replacements for a social life. But, I am up to 13 fast on the first exercise. Or I was on Friday - I spent yesterday too tired and dizzy to do anything and today too dizzy to do anything except for the things I really need to get done this weekend.

I had a good weekend - well, half a good weekend. I went to High Wycombe to drop off some knickers and other stuff for Knickers 4 Africa and go to selenay936's ex-local bookshop. Where I saw her parents and spent £17 on books - that was being restrained. I'm still working through the books I got from my mum and grandmother for my birthday yet.

It was a good day and we somehow managed to avoid the worst of the weather. I was really tired when I got home, which I expected. What I didn't expect was how dizzy I felt Sunday. All I ended up doing on Sunday is lying on the sofa reading and watching tennis because I wasn't capable of doing anything else. Fortunately, there was tennis on - exhibition matches under the new Centre Court roof at Wimbledon and I enjoyed them, although I could have done without the camera moving so much. I didn't even feel like I'd done that much either. I'm less dizzy now but back to going to bed at 10pm.

But on Friday I'm going to see if I feel well enough after work to go and see In the Loop, which wasn't at the cinema walking distance from where I live now. But it is at the cinema walking distance from work on Friday and Saturday. Then it is at least a three day weekend, although I plan to do things with it - not least find a place for all these books to live...

Also, in the unlikely event that there's anyone left who doesn't have a Dreamwidth account that wants one, I have four invites. And, it turns out, Trillian Astra invites, since it's now in beta. And probably has been for a while, I've just failed to notice, just gave them money...

I've been playing around on the blog front.

On my blog you can now comment using just your OpenID. It would have worked a year ago if I'd only known the plugin to show you a preview of your comment was interfering with it...

Also, I'm using a new crossposter. The big advantage of this one is that if I create a password protected post here, it posts it on LJ as a friends locked post. Which is what I always wished the crossposter would do, so that's handy. You'll notice on LJ that the header has changed and now become a footer. Exciting, ay?

Since Dreamwidth made it from closed to open beta the other day (at least from my perspective) I now have an account there: paranoidangel. The crossposter posts simultaneously to both LJ and DW, so I now have three backups of my blog.

When I finally wade into RSS Bandit and the 1157 unread feeds I had in there this morning (some of which I've read in Google Reader, to be fair) I might well take some people off my LJ friends list, since that is merely a list of who I am reading and I suspect I will find that I will just mark some of those as read without reading them.

But it's ok because there are other ways of reading my very rare protected posts - which I only really want to hide from random people who've surfed in randomly. Either you can ask me the password and read it on the blog (or search the blog to find it). Or read it on DW. What I plan to do there is give access to anyone who wishes it - basically if you subscribe to my DW journal, I'll give you access. But if you friend my LJ, I will only friend you back if I'm reading your LJ. Clear as mud?

I also have a second DW account (which I did pay about £2 for but there's really nothing a paid account does that a free one doesn't - the same can be said of LJ). This one is paranoidangel42 and is purely for talking about RP things. So people reading my blog/LJ/DW who aren't interested aren't bored by it and I can have RP-related emails in the right email account. No really, that is important.

I know I have a load of comments to reply to and posts to read and people to subscribe to on DW, it's just going to take me a little while to catch up - feel free to subscribe to me and save me the effort

This seems like the best place to put it. I got pissed off with random people following my Twitter, since they were following thousands of random people, probably in the hopes that I'd follow them without looking and then buy stuff. I was blocking them, but some I wasn't sure of and I didn't think that was a good idea. Also, I don't want people from work to be able to read my Twitter, if they find it.

So I made my updates protected. In theory, if I'm reading the help right, everyone I'm following should be able to read my updates now and the same won't be said of anyone I start following after I protected it. I think.

So if there is anyone who has suddenly found they can't read my Twitter feeds, that's why, and I'll let anyone read it who I know in some form or another.

If anyone wants to know where my Twitter is, take a guess. Or look down the side of my blog. If you don't, you're not missing anything - most of my posts are conversations with other people.

All of a sudden Dreamwidth has become really popular, maybe because it's going live soon, maybe because more and more people are getting invited into closed beta, and people keep asking what it is. So this is my guide, based on why I like the idea of it and my memories of things what have been discussed on the mailing lists. Read more...

Well, I mentioned it to selenay936 at Redemption and she went "Yes, please". Only using more words.

So I have created a copy of my fanfic blog on LJ at pa_fic. I can't crosspost the old entries without a lot of effort, so the entries got back as far as... today. All the rest of my fanfic is on my fanfic blog. I want to say "I hope you appreciate it because it took me ages" but I can't because that was mostly due to me not reading the instructions and therefore putting the wrong information in the boxes.

I am crap at announcing on here when I've posted something new - I usually just bung it on the relevant LJ comms and relevant archive, but now it doesn't matter. If you want to know when I've posted a new fic you can just follow my fanfic LJ. Which is a community, but that's so I don't have to login to edit any of it. Hopefully it'll email me if someone comments - for some reason LJ seems to have stopped emailing me if someone comments to an entry I've made in a community...

Also, I have changed my default icon for the first time in... two years maybe? I like LJ icons being like avatars, so I change my default rarely and rarely use others. This one is me-specific without being fandom specific and if I was in the habit of using management speak I'd say I'd streamlined my online self, since that's the same avatar I have on Twitter and Facebook. But since I speak proper, I couldn't possibly say that.

I'm very amused at people on LJ flailing about, assuming the site is going to be shut down, just because some people got made redundant. Funnily enough, it's a recession, that's the sort of thing that tends to happen in recessions - the news is full of it (or was before there was Gaza and cold and lack of trains).

LJ's so successful that it's unlikely to go under any time soon and if it did there'd be more warning than that, I imagine. M&S closing down some stores was more interesting news on the same lines, although in retrospect not a surprise given that people are trying to shop more cheaply.

My blog and LJ are both automatically backed up. The blog's backed up to a Gmail account every week and since I never delete any emails, just archive them, I have every comment anyone's ever posted too, in the unlikely instance I ever remember that any exist.

I realised, a while ago, that I've been doing that volunteering thing in Doctor Who fandom. I reckon I've inherited it from dad, but I can't get involved in something without volunteering. It's why I've done every exec post in my Rotaract club, am on my third year on District and am on the National Conference organising committee. I did it in LOTR fandom when I was an admin at HASA. Now in DW I've run a ficathon and was an editor for the Sarah Jane newsletter.

I've also reached a point where I just don't like DW fandom any more. As a whole I mean. I'm quite happy with my little corner(s), but the rest I just can't be doing with any more. So I've now stopped doing everything, apart from reading and writing.

While I was taking relevant comms off my LJ friends list, I had a bit of a sort out of the whole thing. I have managed to get my friends list down to 42. I took off a whole load that I'm either just not reading or haven't updated for a long time (mostly the latter, I have to say).

Because the term friends in LJ is so loaded, I just want to repeat that my friends list is a copy of the LJs I am reading in RSS Feeds. I have people on there that aren't friends and people that are friends that aren't on there. Anyone not on my friends list isn't missing out on my friends locked posts because I very rarely make any, and when I do I'll put them on my blog too, which you can ask me for a registration on, and you can use your LJ ID for that.

And while I'm here I want to plead to the people who only say what they're posting about in the LJ cut text and nowhere outside of it - please can you put something in the text of the post or the heading to say what you're talking about? Otherwise I have no idea because I don't see LJ cuts in RSS Feeds, and it also means that the page where you write comments doesn't say either.