Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

I have pulled the migration ripcord and migrated my journal to DreamWidth, where I have the same user ID as LiveJournal: kevin_standlee. Although the queue was empty when I started, it still took quite a while to migrate more than a decade of entries from LJ to DW.

I have cross-posting turned on. I do not at this time intend to close my LiveJournal account, for I am a Permanent member. I don't expect to visit Russia, and thus as far as I can tell, the most they can do to me is close my account. So those of you who have been waiting for me to move before deleting your own accounts can go ahead and do so, I guess.

Comments are still queued for travelswithkuma as DreamWidth continues to be hammered with LiveJournal refugees. Let's hope an influx of Paid members keeps DW running for a while.

We're still waiting for travelswithkuma's journal and comments to make the transfer from LJ to DreamWidth. I'm not going to trigger my own transfer (and set up the link back to LJ from DW) until I've seen Kuma's journal, which is much smaller than mine, moved. If I'm reading the status correctly, there are over 1500 users queued up waiting to have their journals imported to DW.

My own journal is much larger. I may go dark for a few days when I choose to make the jump to DW.

Whatever was clogging LJ's pipes for the past day or so seems to have cleared again. You'd think they'd realize the problem after it happened once.

Last night we got rain, then snow, then rain, then below-freezing temperatures. This has turned the porch and sidewalk into ice-skating rinks. Lisa is on nights at the moment and did what she could, laying down more grit to improve traction.

The weather situation in the Sierra Nevada remains dire (although good for potential drought relief it it remains as snow instead of immediately melting and causing flooding. I heard yesterday that Amtrak has been turning the California Zephyr at Reno and not crossing the mountains, which explains why the eastbound train yesterday appeared to be dark. (Although I assume that passengers with tickets out of Reno eastbound were being accommodated.) From another source on Facebook (a Union Pacific employee), I read that UP has their snow spreaders out. They might have to resort to the Big Guns: the rotary snowplows.

It's difficult to tell yet whether it will be safe for me to drive to the Bay Area this weekend.

I'm not going to leave LiveJournal just yet, but I continue to be nervous about the server move. OTOH, the Russian Overlords of LiveJournal have had control of the servers in California for years already.

Meanwhile, I bit the bullet, paid $80 for a Premium account with BlogBooker, and downloaded my entire LJ clear back to the start in 2005, in both Word and PDF. The free version only allows 4 downloads. The Premium account allows 60 downloads over two years.

BlogBooker is okay, but it also isn't consistent. Sometimes, apparently dependent on the size of the total download, it includes comments, but sometimes not. It takes trial and error (which uses up your allocated downloads) to find out when it will keep comments, and I'd like to retain the comments.

For good measure, I downloaded travelswithkuma's journal as well. In this case, I could do an "all dates" download, because Kuma has far fewer entries. When doing that for WinWord format, it counted as only one download, but generated eight files (one for each year) and retained the comments. The PDF counts also as one download, generating one file and retained the comments.

In order to use BlogBooker to download an LJ, you have to give it your journal's password. Their terms of service say they only retain it for 30 minutes in order to actually download the journal (not surprising; how else could it download Private and F-Locked entries?). So I changed my password temporarily, used that for the downloads, then changed it back. This, along with something mentioned on james_nicoll's LJ, led me to discovering that unless you explicitly type the https://www.livejournal.com/login.bml in the address bar to log in, your connection always goes to http, even for the login screen, which is annoying. But I managed to get it done.

miramon, who like me stopped being able to see comments yesterday, went into Profile/Settings/Display/Site Scheme and set the viewing scheme from XColibur (where it had been forever, I think) to Horizon (Site Default). That fixed the "can't see comments" issue; however, the XColibur viewing option also then disappears from the screen when you reload it, so you can never get it back. I guess that's the fix, then.

LiveJournal has stopped sending me notifications of comments. I didn't do anything, so I hope this is only a temporary issue and they'll figure out how to turn it back on. In the meantime, if it looks like I'm ignoring you, it's more likely that I didn't even know you commented.