LiveJournal Dies

For approximately 5 hours last night, LiveJournal was effectively dead. This was due to a problem in the servers, with the upstream servers.

The problem has been corrected. The reason for the extended downtime was in order to assure that this type of problem would not happen again immediately.

Don't bother opeining a support request or bugging anyone about it. The site went down because this is the internet, and everything breaks sometimes. No one was happy about it, but we all do the best we can.

The site may not be back up for all IPs right now (i'm typing this using a console browser, because I have no access to LJ at the moment.) There will most likely be information made public on this topic in either news or lj_maintenance at some point in the near future, although I won't promise it ;)

For the time being, you guys all rock, I <3 all of you. Some of you need to know that right now, more than anything else in the world.

I did nothing really interesting except try to work on my paper. I actually got some paragraphs done on it.

Oh, and if you really want to ask questions, the best place to do so is comm_news. Someone will look up answers to almost all your questions if you ask, so feel free to wander over there.

Happy thursday everybody.

(no subject)

LJ is still D-E-D dead.

I'm posting this from lynx on my goathack still, just because I'm that addicted to LJ that I need to have access.

Read http://status.livejournal.org/ . Basically, the site got hit by tons of computers trying to download way too much stuff, and it died. Right now, about 1/4th of the internet is blocked so that LJ doesn't die itself. So, if you can't get there, you don't need to keep trying, it won't help.

I don't know when it will be back up. Neither does anyone else. The new siteadmin for LJ says: [12:17:49] <rahaeli> lisa calls this the most crippling DDoS she's ever dealt with.

This is bad shit, and everyone who is working with it is trying their ass off to get things fixed. This is NOT LJ's fault, i repeat, NOTHING has been done wrong by the site. However, some very determined people are very upset, and this is making the whole situation suck.

Good luck to all of you. UIUC kids, just hang in there. the site will be back when it can be, and until that, just sit and wait.

And while you're waiting: http://peanut.sytes.net/whyLJisdead.txt is from Rah's LiveJournal, just in case you can't get there. It's hilarious :)

Japanese Culture essay

Looking for advice on this paper:
Three mini-essays of 3~4 double-spaced, typed pages are required. Prompts for the essays are as follows:

Mini-Essay #1: We often think of Japan as a monolithic culture, but in fact there are many Japanese cultures with interrelated but diverse historical roots.

Note that each prompt consists of two propositions connected by “but.” In your mini-essays, devote approximately equal space to each proposition. The point of this exercise is to give you the opportunity to think about the material covered in the previous weeks and especially the dynamic operating in Japanese culture and society. Your grades will depend largely on how well you capture this dynamic.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!
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