coraa: (don't know history)
[livejournal.com profile] jimhines, an author on LJ who has posted a number of intelligent and thoughtful posts about sexism and sexual assault, is trying to help raise donations for RAINN (the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network) or your local rape/sexual assault crisis center. This is a topic very important to me, so, signal boost!

Support rape crisis centers and enter to win an Advance Copy of Red Hood’s Revenge, by Jim C. Hines.

coraa: (Default)
I know that, after the holidays and supporting Haiti and other charitable causes, a lot of people don't have a lot of spare cash right now. But this cause is worth a look, and you get goodies for your trouble. (Also a number of you are either in or from Los Angeles, and this is something you can do to make a real local impact.)

[livejournal.com profile] helptheproject is an auction to benefit the The Virginia Avenue Project, a free afterschool arts and academics program. 100% of participating children graduate from high school. 95% go on to college. 98% are the first person in their family to go.

Due to budget cuts, unless we can raise $15,000 by mid-March, we will lose our centerpiece program, the One-on-Ones. In this program, professional actor/writers write a short play to act in with the kid they're paired with, rehearse it with them in a beautiful countryside summer camp, and then return to Los Angeles to put on a show. This program has been running continuously for 20 years - let's not lose it now!

Please help save the One-on-Ones by spreading the word, bidding at the auction, and/or offering something for people to bid on. Click on the "offered" or "seller" tags on the right-hand side of the page to see who's got an auction up and what people are offering. There's currently everything from baked goods to books to original fiction. And more.

I'm currently offering several things, including proofreading, a custom cookbook made to order, a Seattle care package, and mini fruit pies in jars.

psa

Oct. 9th, 2009 03:04 pm
coraa: (at tara in this fateful hour)
I had such a good time at Sirens and Camp Lipizzan that I can't even describe it, but I'll post about that more tonight and tomorrow, when I'm in a bit less of a rush. (I'm traveling home as we speak.)

But! Before I forget, I want to remind you all of the [livejournal.com profile] care_faith_hope auction to benefit a friend whose husband just had major heart surgery, which closes tomorrow (Saturday) at 11:59 p.m.

My offers are all baked goods, and include four loaves of bread, two batches of chocolate spice cookies, three types of bar cookies, and sourdough starter. There are also a variety of other things offered -- some of which have few bids and are comparatively cheap! -- for some lovely jewelry, hand-knitted scarves, jams, cookies, pilates lessons, music, writing, editing, and more.
coraa: (boom de yada)
[livejournal.com profile] faithhopetricks is a friend of mine, and she's been having a ridiculously bad year. The current straw that's breaking the camel's back is that her husband requires immediate heart surgery for a life-threatening condition, and they have no insurance. In addition, both have other serious and life-threatening health issues that have gone untreated due to lack of funds; as with so many people, all this has been compounded by the awful economy.

In response, several of her friends pulled together to create a fandom charity auction to raise the money for their medical and medical-related expenses. The auction is [livejournal.com profile] care_faith_hope, and as of right now it features a wide variety of things up for sale -- jewelry, books, baked goods, stories written-to-order. For those of you in the Seattle area, like me, one of the things up for auction is a set of six pilates lessons. For those of you who are in Southern California, or have a good chance of visiting, possibly the coolest thing for auction right now is a guided tour of Charlie Chaplin Studios, current home of the Jim Henson Company. Also competing for the title of 'coolest thing' is a copy of the second printing of the first edition of Through The Looking Glass by Carroll, from 1895. You can also help by offering your skills and services yourself.

So far, I'm offering four loaves of bread, and dried samples of my homemade sourdough starter. I'll probably also be offering some jewelry, once I get my act together enough to take pictures.

More details are in the community profile; check [livejournal.com profile] care_faith_hope for more info on the auction's purpose and how to bid or offer.

(Note that, while I'm a friend of [livejournal.com profile] faithhopetricks and fully support this auction, I'm not a moderator of the community, just a contributor. Questions should go to the community mods.)
coraa: (serious face)
There's been a round of journal hacking on LJ recently. Many victims (probably not all, but many) get caught out because they've got a Hotmail e-mail account associated with their LJ account, but the Hotmail account has gone unused for some time. After a while, Hotmail will purge the account... and recycle the username. What this means is that someone can go create a new Hotmail account with the same name as your old one, then tell LJ to send them a password reset for that account. The password reset will go to the Hotmail account that they now control, and they can use it to change your password and take over your journal. They often then wipe out your entire journal history and replace it with a link to another site; if your friends follow it, they'll often find that it's infected with viruses, malware or spyware.

This sucks. And it's becoming increasingly widespread; a couple friends and acquaintances have now been hit.

Some things to do to protect yourself:

1. Go to the E-mail Management page on LJ and make sure that all of the addresses there are current and under your control. If need be, log into the e-mail accounts just to make sure they're still yours. (Hotmail is the only one I know for sure has this problem, but it would not shock me to learn that, e.g., Yahoo does the same thing. Better safe than sorry.) Remove any that you no longer control or aren't sure about; the page should only list e-mail addresses you are now using.

2. Set a secret question. The person requesting a password reminder will have to answer this secret question before the password reset will be sent to them. That way, even if they've got your e-mail, they may not be able to get the reset.

3. Use a strong password. While the hackings I know of were mostly all the Hotmail e-mail address hack, it's still a good idea to make sure that your password isn't easily guessable.

4. Back up your journal. For a lot of people, the worst thing about losing the journal is that the hackers delete everything. That's years and years of personal information, poof, gone; even if they regain control of the account, it may not be recoverable. A journal backup means that even if your LJ is gone forever, you still have all your posts/comments/etc. If you're on Windows, you can do this one of two ways -- using LJArchive, which creates a local copy that can't be re-uploaded to LJ but that preserves all of your info (including comments) and can be exported as HTML, or using LJSec to create a mirror to another LJ-architecture site (like InsaneJournal, Journalfen, etc), which doesn't preserve comments but does allow for re-uploading. More info on both methods is at brown_betty's LJ backup guide. I've used both of those methods successfully myself. If you're on something other than Windows, I've heard good things about LJBook (which creates a PDF) and LJDump (a Python script), but have not used them myself.

Important Note: Many hacked journals have their content replaced by a pointer to a new website. This website is often a trap, laden with viruses, malware, etc. If you see someone post something that looks odd or suspicious -- especially if it's 'I'm leaving LJ and going elsewhere!' or 'check out my new journal!' -- hover over those links and see if they actually point you where they say they point you. Don't click 'em unless they check out. Communities can be hacked, too, so if you see something like this on a comm, be suspicious of that, too.

EDIT: I've successfully used both LJArchive and LJ-Sec myself, so if you have any questions about them, I may be able to answer them.
coraa: (ophelia)
LJ is having server maintenance tomorrow. There's no reason to believe that this will cause any data loss, but it's a good reminder to back up, if you care about that sort of thing.

I use LJ Archive for Windows. It backs up posts and comments. There are other programs out there that you can find by Googling, but I've never tried any of them.

Also, LJ Archive has a word count analyzer, which will tell you what words you use the most (less super-common words like 'the' and so on). For me, the top twenty are:

1. actually
2. today
3. start
4. changeling
5. nice
6. someone
7. bread
8. sauce
9. stuff
10. cook
11. food
12. garlic
13. post
14. game
15. oven
16. maybe
17. couple
18. usually
19. problem
20. potatoes

...which is sort of hilariously accurate. Food, fantasy, and equivocation, that's me.

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