31 thoughts on “Open Thread: Making Light is Down”

  1. Just putting up the same comment (with an addition) that I put up on Patrick’s lj — the makinglight feed

    http://syndicated.livejournal.com/makinglight/

    on lj goes back to April 13th, with full posts (and you can even get the coding out of it again by looking at the page source). That means that if you find someone who has the feed on their lj (and you don’t mind doing a big sweep backwards), you can find all your posts by going through their friends list. For dates of what was posted when, you can go to Technorati’s feed thingy.

  4. Crap.

    It’s funny but when you said it was down (and I didn’t know about the data loss, I was amused at how I was acting (save the gut-wrenchig) as if it were a minor disaster.

    Sadly, it turns out that’s the case.

    And that’s a lot of data; with some things I really liked reading/writing.

    Which reminds me I need to back up my LJ again, but I’ve no idea how to find temp files which might be saved.

    The funny thing (for certain value of funny) is Bruce Scheier wrote a column about this sort of problem (the web as hard drive) a couple of months ago.

  5. trifles: That also means (I think), one can just add the feed, and it will be available

    That gets front page, at least.

  7. Speaking of finals, so far I’ve had one sex change operation turn up: “Goldman’s theories would argue that Hillary Clinton is just as capable as other males, to become president.”

  8. Maia, speaking of finals, is done (barring disasters), with USC. She had her “comps” yesterday. So, all that’s left is the shouting (there is the unpleasant option, she failed them, and has to take them again in Dec., but this is an evil which we don’t talk about).

    So, an internship, her boards, and the registry recording it, and she’s a genuine OT.

    Whoot.

  9. Anybody saw “IronMan” last night? The cast was great. So were the SFX, especially during the final battle. The plot had humor. And yet… Something was lacking. Some mythical dimension, maybe, moments like in “Superman returns” when Kal-El is high above Metropolis and he watches, making sure that everybody is safe. Or that scene in the 2nd “Spiderman” when Peter Parker collapses after saving a train from destruction and people carry him away like a Knight fallen in battle.

  12. Fragano: Mostly she thought they were stupid, though the sweating them; when she had four papers due and the sudying to do.

    That was (at the end of year party) the general consensus.

    What was funny is that I was talking about the evolution thread at boing boing, and when I said one of the topics was hermeneutics she stoppped me, made me repeat it, made me spell it, then define it, and said she wished she’d known that word before the test, as she’d never heard it before.

  13. Serge, I don’t know that I’ll see the movie, but Slate recommended the Hulk/IronMan free comic for today, so I picked that up with two others.

  14. Terry: I’m surprised that a new term (and a concept as difficult as hermeneutics) would be introduced right at the end. I’m glad she got through it.

  16. I’d love an explanation for this statement: “The political theories of Confucius and Mencius are like Mo Tzu’s irrelevant to today because they focus on what the individual needs to do to create a better society.”

  17. Fragano: apparently either the writer thinks that what the individual needed to do to improve the society of Confucius’ time is irrelevant to our situation today, or that there is no point in individuals trying to improve society.

    Offer of drinks still stands, if you like. I’ll be in ATL next Saturday.

  18. Lila, we’re always interested in a drink and if we’re still standing next Saturday (because I’ll be in the middle of the final batch of finals then) that should be possible.

  19. Ah, well. I guess this is good a time as any to start commenting at ML with dummy text in my email address, as the only reason I hadn’t yet was to preserve the linearity of my comments.

    I’m at my (actually UMass’s and SUNY Binghamton’s) translation studies conference at the moment. If there are those who are interested in the content, I’ll be blogging summaries and comments at my livejournal after it’s all over tomorrow (as well as my own presentation of my completed translation of Eurpides’ Bakkhai.

  20. Marilee… Oh, right, today was free-comic day. About “Ironman”, what bummed me is that its director, Jon Favreau is a comics fan and should not have made what I felt was a mistake. Of course he and I may be fans, but that doesn’t mean we get the same thing out of comics.

  21. Frustrating. I’d almost been taking ML for granted and it’s the richest spot on the web for me. (There may be other discussion threads just as lively somewhere in the world but if so I don’t know about them)

    I was following an interesting link from one of the open threads and now I can’t find it again; the thing someone wrote about attitudes toward sexuality at renaissance fairs.

  23. This is just to say

    I have eaten
    the blog
    that is called
    Making Light

    and which
    you were probably
    hoping
    to read

    Forgive me
    it was delicious
    so sweet
    and so rich

  24. “What is a light year?”
    “Same as a regular year, only it has less calories.”

    (from 1987’s ‘Roxanne’)

  27. Does anybody know if someone has posted on YouTube the scene from “The Blues Brothers” where Jake Blues sees the Light?

  28. Odd how coincidences happen. The MySQL database that houses the data for the hotel where I work collapsed on Thursday. The backup was . . . not successful.

    We lost everything back to January 7th. About ten thousand individual records, covering the previous ~4 months and future 10 months. Billing, reservations, everything is gone.

    The damage is insane, and our department has been working 14 hour days trying to rebuild from the fragmented physical copies.

    Hope you manage to recover most things.

  29. I loved the story about the softball team! It made me tear up a bit, but I’m blaming that on the peanut. Because I never teared up at particularly schlocky Hallmark commercials and especially sad songs before, no siree!

    Thank you to those who saved my comments for the restoration of Making Light too, btw. I’ll be off trying to figure out some other way spend my copious free time now… I’ve got some eBooks from Tor that still need reading. Think I’ll start on those!

  30. Spherical time, when I worked at a major Waikiki hotel I used to wonder about that too. We backed up religiously (every four hours), but if the tape drives had been copying poorly or not at all we’d not have known it.

    Thing is, the hotel had gotten so computerized I don’t think it had slots for room keys anymore, even buried in the catacombs. And forget billing outgoing phone calls, reservations, and all the rest.

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