Well, I am.
LiveJournal has decided to get rid of Basic accounts as an option for new members. Existing basic accounts will be allowed to stay. This was announced, or rather not announced at all, in this news posting, which merely says: We streamlined and simplified things so that now it’s faster and easier than ever to create a LiveJournal account.
Users wanted to find out what that meant, noticed differences in the account options as mentioned in the FAQs, and were enraged. That news posting got over 2400 comments so far.
The staff appeared to be taken by surprise by this uproar, after all, as they said, 'existing users aren't influenced by this decision', that they first tried to 'sell'  as an attempt to make the signup proces 'easier'. Users didn't agree, for several reasons:
- Some users want more journals, for different purposes, so many existing users WILL feel the influence.
- 'Basic' users provide content, too. Many of them provide a lot of the content that many of the paid users are here for. In other words, what's left of LiveJournal if your friends don't want to use it anymore, because they have to either pony up or swallow the ads as soon as they do join?
- Many users don't feel that they can recommend LJ to friends anymore.
I'm one of them. I want to tell people 'Come on over to LiveJournal, it's free, and you don't have to have ads on your blog if you don't want to'. But that's not true anymore. Do I have to tell them how to install FireFox or SeaMonkey and AdBlock now, as well?

There's a new news posting out. It's gotten 1968 comments so far. You don't need to read all of those, but you might want to read the news posting itself.
At least, they're now openly saying that yes, it was a 'business decision'.  :-/

I left MySpace for this, only to find it turning into a MySpace clone?
Hell yes, I'm angry!

Today was a fine day and Friday is market day. So we grabbed some BookCrossing books to release on the way, and walked into town.
Here's what we got:
- fresh shrimps and fish for a fish soup
- some fried fish to eat on the spot, one of my favourite street foods
- a pineapple (which was very ripe, and delicious, we just had it for dessert)
- spring onions, red peppers and soy bean sprouts for Nasi Goreng
- two kinds of mushrooms, and fresh spinach, for filled pancakes
- chestnuts of the edible kind, for roasting in the oven
- some useful stuff in cheap spray cans: wax spray to prevent rust on vehicles, an oily spray to prevent bread from sticking to the baking tin, carburettor cleaner, and a kind of copper grease for greasing things that get hot
- two pairs of jeans for me, at just 10 euros each, and you know what? They both fit!

The man in the vegetables stall was looking for a knife to cut something with, so Stoneshop lent him his Leatherman, which made a great impression all around. One of his workers wanted to see it, so I handed him mine (which is almost identical) so he could take a look. It took a while before Stoneshop got his knife back, but when he did, it came with a free pear as payment for 'renting' the knife.
Friendly people,  nice weather, happy day.

At the Chinese store, we also bought
- a block of tempeh, which was also for the Nasi Goreng
- and a bag of deep frozen shrimps.

I took pictures of the pretty flowering plants that were being sold. They happened to catch my eye. You'd probably prefer me to show you a Real Dutch Cheese Seller's Market Stall, wouldn't you? Well, I'll do that some other time.