Until the Dragon Comes

For them that knows about electricity etc. ;-)

For quite a few years now, a lot of British lightshades have had warnings on them that they shouldn't be used with bulbs more powerful than 60 watts. This made perfect sense - bulbs get hot, and you don't want a too hot bulb in an enclosed space.

What's baffling us is that new lightshades have transferred that to the new low-energy light bulbs - so a shade that can only take a 60 watt normal bulb, can apparently only cope with an 11 watt low-energy bulb. How does that makes sense? Surely the point is that an 11 watt low-energy bulb puts out the same amount of light as a 60 watt traditional one, while using less energy, i.e. not wasting it as heat. So why can lightshade that can cope with 60 watts not cope with 17?

Or had we completely misunderstood what the issue was, and there's some very good reason why we can only use very dull bulbs?

I still haven't decided definitely what to do long term. The current iteration of Delicious is several hundreds times better than the mess we were confronted with on the 27th, but there's a lot of trust lost, and it still hasn't restored the network functionality.

I've been really impressed with Pinboard, which is a paid (though not exactly expensive) alternative. The owner has been extremely welcoming and responsive to fandom in general, as major users of Delicious looking for a new home, and generally come over a class act. So I've bought an account, to at the least use as a backup - I'd much rather give my money to someone who's willing to treat fans with respect.

If you're interested in following some of the discussion, then there are some feeds to follow (for Dreamwidth, if anyone actually wants them on LJ just shout and I'll find/make them):

pinboard_blog_feed for the main site blog, or at least read his latest entry "The Fans Are All Right"

A Tumblr blog- The Fandom Tag Cloud fandomcloudtumblr_feed with links to relevant blogs/posts etc

And there's a fandom pinboard community on LJ - the Dreamwidth feed is pinboard_lj_feed

Two things you may not know...

If you're using LJ Hook - and seriously, if you're using Firefox, why aren't you using LJ Hook, unless you like typing HTML - then you'll be pleased to know that you can fix it to work with Dreamwidth. If you go to the bottom of the LJ Hook Menu, you'll see Preferences and from that menu you can pick Clones Manager. Just add dreamwidth.org to the list by typing it in the box and clicking Enable and Bob's your uncle, handy right-click menu and icon randomiser. :-)

ETA For those of you installing LJ Hook for the first time - the instructions seem to be dreadful to non-existent. If you are in a LJ text box, right-click and LJ Hook will be one of the items in the menu that comes up, just follow the arrows for the sub menus. The thing for randomising icons is a small greenish button that appears next to the drop down where you select the userpic/icon. Hopefully that should sort it out, but if you have any problems ask and I'll do what I can to help.


The other is that if you like the Dreamsheep, like the one in my icon, there's a whole community for posting and sharing them - dreamsheep. There's a download of the base in the first post, if you feel like making your own.

For those of you who haven't already seen it on saturn92103 or king_pellinor's journals, a very important link.

"For those worried about the Large Hadron Collider, and the possibility that it might destroy life, the universe and everything, there's a live status report available at http://www.hasthelhcdestroyedtheearth.com/ which should keep you up to date."