the official MLIA blog

Labor day has come and gone and all the non-average beings have returned to the folds of the average; back to school and back to work.
Though thoughts of the summer will carry us through the next few weeks, soon it will be time to think about the end of the year and what charity we want to support. In the past we’ve donated to Toys for Tots and Charity:Water. The MLIA store is down at the moment, but once it is back up – no later than November 1st, I promise – all store proceeds, from now until the end of the year, will be donated to charity. Please leave your charity suggestions in the comments below. By November Charity:Water should also have an update for us on the status of the well we funded. Fingers crossed.

Last year Facebook started suggesting tags on photos using facial recognition technology, but this feature was only available to North American users. Now they’ve opened it up to everybody and guess what? You are not just invited, you are already participating!

If you want to save your friends the effort of clicking on your face and don’t mind facebook recognizing you everywhere you go, read no further.

However, if you’d like to take your face out of facebook, here’s how to do it.

In the top right corner of any facebook page, click Account then Privacy Settings.

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Select Customize settings below the Privacy Settings table

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Scroll down to the “Things others share” section and click Edit Settings next to “Suggest photos of me to friends”

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Select Disabled from the drop-down menu on the right side of the modal popup

I started writing a post a few days ago, it began, “My friend has a shirt that says, ‘Procrastinate, because if the world ends tomorrow you won’t have to do it’”. It should have been completed yesterday, but fittingly enough, I postponed putting the finishing touches on it until today. The post concluded, “Since MLIA began in May 2009, the MLIA community has grown much larger and stronger than I would have ever imagined”.

Today, as I’m sure many of you are aware, a number of inappropriate stories were posted on MLIA. I suppose those involved must have thought it was funny to publish stories with mildly offensive words on the MLIA homepage, but they were wrong. They might have had a giggle, but the vast majority of the MLIA community just thought it was childish. I’ve always believed the community should be able to police itself and have resisted creating a long list of banned words. I hope that what happened today is an exception – not the rule – and MLIA can continue to be the self-regulating, self-moderating, super-awesome community it has been for the past two years.

Keep it average.

Over the past 48 hours, we’ve been experiencing a number of outages as we tried (at first, unsuccessfully) to move MLIA onto a more stable setup. We’ve just tried moving again and it seems to be working properly.

We think we’ve ironed out most of the wrinkles, but please bear with us if more bugs crop up. For instance, let us know if you see ‘banned remoteip’ when trying to submit a story. We know that might be a potential issue.

Thank you for all your great charity suggestions.

NZChicky said it best

You have suggested so many good charities. IT’S HARD TO PICK JUST ONE!

Obviously there are many deserving charities and even more deserving causes and I wish we could give loads of money to all of them! But, to achieve the greatest impact I would like to pick one.

The Humane Society, ASPCA, In Defense of Animals, and Big Cat Rescue are all wonderful charities, but would prefer to choose a charity that benefits humans. As much as I love our furry feline and canine friends, I am speciesist and think humans should come first.

Among the suggestions were two seasonal charities, Toys for Tots and Family Giving Tree. Last year, we donated $3500 to Toys for Tots and in the interest of “spreading the love” I’d like to pick a different charity this year.

There was a common theme among the charities you suggested. Kisses for Kyle, Prepare To Live (aka CanTeen), Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, the Jimmy Fund, and CaringBridge all offer support for children with cancer or other serious illnesses, which got me thinking…

Family House is a charity that provides temporary housing to families of seriously ill children receiving treatment at the UCSF Children’s Hospital. As most of us can only imagine, cancer treatment is a grueling experience. Family House provides families with the opportunity to stay close together, during a time when they need each other more than ever.

This year’s December proceeds will go to Family House.

On a side note, if you are considering donating to a charity, now or in the future, I would highly recommend using Charity Navigator to learn how charities use their donations before donating.

As promised, I’ve added a new design to the store – the fittingly titled Together We Are Average shirt.

I almost forgot! There will be a coupon available later this week. I’ll post it as soon as it’s available.

UPDATE: The coupon is here. Free shipping on orders to the US and Canada. Enter MLIASHIP2 during checkout, valid until 12/15/10.

It’s December again! Time flies when you are having fun.

This time last year, after countless requests, we started selling MLIA shirts. It being the holidays and all, we decided to donate all the proceeds for that month to charity. We raised $3500 for Toys for Tots in less than two weeks and another $1500 for the construction of a well by the end of the December. We continued to donate the proceeds from the MLIA store for another 5 months, until we had raised enough for the construction of an entire well.

I am happy to announce that all of this year’s December proceeds will also go to charity. I need your help deciding which charity. It would be nice to fund the construction of another well, but there are also many other well deserving charities out there. If you have a preference, please let me know in the comments.

On a related note, I’ll be adding new items to the MLIA store soon – before Sunday.

Average Pie – an ‘original’ song by MLIA commenter extraordinaire KitSnicket. Uhh, I mean, regular everyday normal commenter, KitSnicket.

Props to the person who brought this to my attention ( you know who you are )

It’s been a while since my last post. (I should probably copy that and put it at the top of all my posts)

Girl Talk’s latest album, All Day, is here. If you haven’t heard of Girl Talk before, he is a DJ/musician who samples hundreds of songs to create full-length albums in which all the “songs” are connected. For example, All Day, samples over 350 different songs by various artists.

Best of all, Girl Talk releases his albums for FREE! That’s right, even if you don’t like music, you have to love the price.

Disclaimer: All Day contains explicit lyrics. If you are under 17 please check with a parent or guardian before downloading.

Download All Day by Girl Talk

If you only read the first sentence of my posts, you probably didn’t know that I made a few changes last week before quickly pulling the plug because they broke the site, but I’ve just re-released those changes and go Giants!

If you actually read my posts, the entire post: Thank you.  By now you’ve already heard (from me; in the first sentence) that I’ve re-released the latest changes. They include slicker login/registration pages and the ability to collapse threads of comments.

Getting the bugs worked out took a little longer than expected, because I don’t know where to buy exercise equipment for ants! I was moving – at the same time! Buh-bye LA. Hello London!

In other news, go Giants!

This will be short.

Last night I rolled out a small update. The first change you might notice is the login and registration pages are slightly different. The login form is smaller and signing up is now like filling out a mad-libs. The other noticeable change is that you can now collapse comment threads on stories. Click the ‘[ - ]‘ to make an entire conversation disappear, this will make it easier to skip over threads that don’t pertain to the post… lol. Props to typer2131 for finding the first bug (now fixed) which made it impossible to submit stories. xoXdancerXox also discovered a bug which I’ll fix in the next update.

m.mlia.com also got a small update. You can now login to the mobile site – no commenting yet, but submitted stories are associated with your account.

Finally, unrelated to anything, here is a YouTube video for your enjoyment.