Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

Tags: holiday coupons, lj_photophile, ljlimericks, my guests, red ribbon vgift

Tags: daughter, photography, theory, travel
Current Location: 85704

Well, the Cal-Kansas game has come and gone. The Bears played well for the first thirty minutes, then faded. A lot of calls went against them in succession, too, which didn't help. I didn't have my hopes up, since the team only recently got reasonably healthy and had just come off a long lay-off. I don't think it's any accident that key starter Theo Robertson, who had missed the Madison Square Garden losses and the one at New Mexico -- never an easy place to play -- had a sterling first half and then disappeared. It takes a while to get one's stamina back.

I'm disappointed, of course. I wish we'd pulled one of our early season tests out. But being down seven to the top-ranked Jayhawks in Lawrence, who had won forty-eight straight at home, with 5:36 to go beats getting blown out of the water by Syracuse on a semi-neutral court. As Bobby Knight said during his color commentary, it's hard to think of any loss as a "good" one. That said, I still think Cal has a decent shot at doing well in the Pac-10 and making the Dance, even though the conference will probably only get three teams in this year. Having the strength of schedule they do, a huge upgrade over previous years, will help the RPI.

The Bears need to play better defense, close games with more intensity, as Kansas did tonight, and do a better job of moving both Robertson and Patrick Christopher, who seems to have worked his way out of a dreadful early-season slump, off screens so there's less hand-in-the-face three point shooting as the shot clock winds down. Oh, and we really could use Harper Kamp, whom I fear may be out for the season. We're just too thin down low, literally, on top of also being too short.

Tags: sports
Current Location: 85704

I wonder why more people here don't do their Christmas shopping at night. I was forced to go out during the day several times this week and was incredulous that anyone could prevail in such conditions. Maybe that's why shoppers brave the psychological elements: achieving even half of one's goal seems like a miracle. For my part, I start to get light-headed in such close quarters. I'd much rather roam the deserted aisles.

Tags: analysis, everyday, holiday
Current Location: 85704

i_hope_that
For many of us, the holidays can be kind of rough. If you're searching for a network of understanding friends, this ultra-nurturing community encourages you to express your heartfelt wishes and offer other members encouragement and acceptance. Not for the terminally snarky or emotionally-challenged, this is a good-spirited place to lend comfort and support.

Tags: i_hope_that, support, wishes

diygifts
Feeling crafty? If you've got a few last folks on your holiday gift list, this is a great place to seed your creativity and generosity. You'll also discover wonderful DIY tips to decorate your home and entertain guests. Offering a no-frills-no-skills attitude that welcomes the cash-challenged and arts-phobic, you're sure to get ideas and make friends in the process.

Tags: crafts, diygifts, do it yourself

cooking_club
A fun and friendly community dedicated to those who love to cook, whether you're a meat-and-potatoes type, an aspiring gourmand, and/or a vegan. In search of a brilliant dish to use up those weekly leftovers? Post your ingredients and you'll be whipping up a feast by dinner. You can also share favorite recipes. For Type A chefs, you can spice up your culinary repertoire with exciting cooking challenges.

Tags: cooking_club

Tags: autobiography, music, photography
Current Location: 85704

I still haven't caught up with a world in which people post their wish lists online and actually get a meaningful response. But since nobody asked, I thought I'd give a rundown of my own special desires:

• A six-pack of Jever pilsener that hasn't gone skunky with age
• A large bag full of real sour cherries
• The smell of a sugar-free Monster drink, the sort in the blue-and-black can, on a cold December night
• That Big Red Book of Carl Jung's, recently made available in English
• More friends who are up, literally and figuratively, for indulging my only-after-10-pm night life
• A good showing against Kansas on Tuesday
• A whiff of yatagan
• Credit where credit is due
• A DVD of Germany In Autumn
• The sound of a burbling stream
• A turntable that has both analog and USB outputs
• The discovery of previously suppressed Jean-Jacques Beineix films the equal of Diva
• A human touch
• The use of an apartment in Berlin for a month
• A case of A-Treat red cream soda
• A DSLR worthy of my photographic ability
• The Lego Hogwarts Express
• Coffee with Adam Phillips
• The chance to perform in an avant-garde staging of J.G. Ballard's Crash
• A complete set of the recordings, including outtakes, that Rainer Ptacek made in the last year of his life
• Dinner at the old Café Terra Cotta, at Campbell and River, circa 1997
• My Olympus portable digital recorder, together with its contents, inexplicably vanished sometime in 2008
• A weekend in Mendocino
• That enormously comforting sense of having begun in earnest
• A patron, individual or institutional, to pay me for my writing and editing
• Three hours at The Shelter
• A reason to get the Lox platter at Saul's, sometime in the late 1980s
• The Matchbox Pontiac GTO, #22, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in purple and with the faux-metallic hubcaps on Superfast wheels
• A surefire regimen for improving one's vertical leap by about six inches
• That spot where the back of the neck becomes the side of the neck
• The strength to pursue my passions now, instead of deferring them to a future that may never come
• A hug

Needless to say, the list could go on longer than a Henry James sentence. But that will do for the moment. If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Tags: analysis, autobiography, everyday
Current Location: 85704

stepstomarrow
When granddaughter, Jada, was born with leukemia, a donor-match was located and Jada made a miraculous recovery. In honor of her grandaughter's health, Jeanna has decided to walk across the country (in the dead of winter) to raise awareness and build support for the bone marrow registry (all that's required is a cheek swab). Follow Jeanna's remarkable journey as she travels the United States by foot.