| May 22 News |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 03:36 pm] |
Advisory Board Elections
Today, May 22nd, marks the beginning of the Advisory Board Election process. Polls will be open through the 29th. Out of the following list, find the candidate you think is best-suited to provide the kind of input we at LiveJournal can use to better the site:
vichan
twirlandswirl
tango
squeaky19
sollitaire
rm
randomposting
qfemale
primitivepeople
mrflagg
lostcosmonaut
lordandrei
lizyd
legomymalfoy
jmaynard
jj_maccrimmon
jette
jameth
imc
fuzzface00
deathboy
daniidebrabant
cambler
This is for you guys, so cast your vote! The polls are waiting at ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) lj_election_en.
New V-Gifts
Summer's finally here! The season brings warm weather, the spirit of apprecciation, and, naturally, a slew of new v-gifts. If you're looking to celebrate a special friendship, the spirit of theatre or a loved one's graduation, we've got perfect ornaments for the occasion. Take a gander at these fine options and get your celebration on.
L to R: daisy, theatre masks, tiara, diploma, graduation cap
TxtLJ
You can use LiveJournal's TxtLJ service to receive text notifications and make posts to your journal with your mobile phone. Give us some feedback on the experience at feedback. What would make TxtLJ more useful? How can we improve the service for you guys?
LJ Dashboard
We've cooked up a new utility at LJ Labs, where we're developing a whole host of LJ side projects.
Introducing LJ Dashboard, a portal to the most popular communities, journals and entries on LiveJournal. Now there's a mechanism to help you discover new content and keep track of what's happening out there. Login to the Dashboard using your Open ID, which is exampleusername.livejournal.com. After you're asked to grant identity validation to dashboard.livejournal.com, you'll be all set to poke around and play with some of the things we've come up with.
Since we're launching LJ Dashboard for the first time, we encourage you to post some feedback at lj_labs.
We're currently running some house ads on the Dashboard. Soon ads for external businesses will replace them. But right now all users see them because, for the time being, we don't have a way of distinguishing between paid and unpaid users on the Dashboard. Have no fear: soon as we've got that worked out, paid users will be spared. Thanks for your patience!
We're having a lot of fun with some great ideas right now so keep an eye out for new LJ Labs releases! |
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| bits and pieces |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 05:11 pm] |
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Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter |
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| *3.1% of men who have sex with men found to be HIV-infected in landmark HIV |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 05:46 pm] |
Singapore – May 23, 2008 – 3.1% of men who have sex with men (MSM) were
found to be HIV-infected in a landmark project to make HIV testing more
accessible to the MSM community. Nine hundred and sixty MSM volunteered for
the free and anonymous testing service at MSM frequented venues, of which 30
tested positive for HIV.
This HIV prevalence among MSM is one of the lowest in the region.
The objective of the initiative was to enhance HIV awareness, encourage HIV
testing and gauge the acceptability of community based HIV-testing among MSM
in Singapore. The project was conducted by AfA at venues and establishments
frequented by MSM between December 2007 and February 2008, using the
OraQuick test.
The effort was warmly received by people who participated in the outreach.
Both members of the community and business owners were quick to praise the
initiative, which was titled Take the Test. Take Control.
One participant remarked "Getting an HIV test can be a scary experience, but
knowing one's status is really quite a liberating experience." It was his
first HIV test, as it was for 27% of those who participated in the project.
"These findings suggest that while MSM are at high-risk for HIV infection,
scaled up and targeted AIDS campaigns that include clear messages
emphasizing correct & consistent condom use during anal intercourse and
regular HIV testing have been effective in keeping the HIV prevalence among
Singaporean MSM relatively low," says Mr Daniel Tung, Action for AIDS' MSM
programme director.
"However the community must not become complacent, we cannot afford to drop
our guard of adopting safer sex practices and specifically 100% condom use
for anal intercourse. Complacency has been the case in many other cities
that have recently documented alarming increases in HIV prevalence among
MSM."
In a post-campaign survey following last year's **Think Again* campaign,
unprotected anal sex between men was found to have been reduced by between
22-27%compared to the statistics from the Behavioural Surveillance Studies
(BSS) conducted by Fridae in 2006.
In the 2006 BSS, 46.9% of MSM surveyed had an HIV test in the preceding 12
months. The proportion of recent HIV testing is a result of community
efforts to raise the awareness of the risk of HIV within the MSM community.
AfA is aiming for this number to hit 80% by 2011.
To emphasise the message of personal responsibility, AfA, together with gay
media company Fridae.com are launching a new campaign – *We Can Stop AIDS
Now*. The campaign focuses on individual empowerment, and shows how HIV
transmission can stop today if everyone plays their role. Campaign
materials can be found at venues frequented by MSM, or by logging into
www.stopaidsnow.info.
Action for AIDS would like to thank the community, business owners and
volunteers who participated in this important project, and the Ministry of
Health for providing the funding. |
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| Release R30 |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 02:24 pm] |
Salutations,
As you can see the list of changes is rather long. It's mostly because this release contains many changes that were done but not put in the previous one.
- Inbox's buttons behavior was modified: "Delete all" and "Mark all read" affect items in current folder only
- Navigation added to community management pages
- Content flagging pages were redesigned to improve usability
- The tag limit for non-Basic users was increased to 1200
- Fixed bug with authorship of comments in e-mail notifications ("there was reply to YOUR comment")
- A couple of e-mail notifications were localized (New VGift, Befriended)
- Calendar view of journal was modified - now you see the number of posts you have permission to read
- Day navigation in journal ("next day"/"prev day") was modified - now it skips days without entries you can read
- You can specify width and height for LJ Embeds now
- Fixed bug with OpenID account that could switch to Plus and get a S2 error on friends page
- Issue of displaying screened comments in Expressive was resolved
- Several new vgift were added
- OpenID users must answer ReCAPTCHA challenge before validating e-mail
- Charity vGifts can't be paid with intangible coupons now
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| Neighbors Update: Ms Havisham, NYU Boy-Next-Door Turned Mr. Hipster, and Girl named Ian |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 04:06 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | life | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  busy | ] |
1. This new episode of Neighbors is called "Miss Havisham relights my fire." She left the stove fire burning. I could either caution her against making the same mistake or tell the landlady to do so. If I tell the landlady, Miss Havisham will think I'm snitching. If I talk to Miss Havisham myself, she may think that I'm trying to chat her up, and she'll fantasize of me. What's a boy to do?
2. NYU Boy-Next-Door couldn't bear the loneliness and transferred his credits to a university near to his hometown. But before that, of course he had to show off his girlfriend to me. She's very beautiful with her pellucid skin that glows and her soft long hair, reminding me of a young Gwyneth Paltrow. I was rather taken aback because he isn't that good looking, a little too stumpy and rough. Beauty and the beast or Donald and Melania Trump or maybe a little of both?
3. So NYU Boy-next-door moved out. In moved Mr. Hipster. He has eyes spaced apart, a nose that looks punched in, and post-corrective hare-lips. We haven't exchanged names although we've spoken several times. He has that funky, cool personality that I like because I'm missing those qualities myself.
4. The Portuguese who is subletting my room has arrived last weekend. Her name is Ian, and my name is Mr. Mattress on the Floor. Again. She wears a pair of black plastic rimmed, almost-cat-eyed glasses and is the last child of her family, so she's a little delicate and over-protected. However, we get along quite well even though we have to face each other in such a confined space. I've been bringing her around and will be meeting her for dinner. |
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| The Current State of the Democratic Campaign |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 09:06 pm] |
...is graphically shown below. Thanks to towleroad for the cite...
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| Quite possibly the clearest reason to commit suicide yet... |
[May. 22nd, 2008 | 09:29 pm] |
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