the official MLIA blog

Within the next 24 36 hours MLIA will be taken offline while the site is moved to a new server.
The MLIA team recommends taking slow, deep breaths to avoid hyperventilation during this downtime.

Keep it average,
Mek

Update: AverageWizard is now on the new servers. Be advised, MLIA might be down for up to 15 hours while the data is transferred. Thanks for your patience.

Update 2: It shouldn’t be much longer now.

Update 3: The switch has been hit. MLIA is coming soon to a browser near you.

Don’t worry, I am not planning on turning the blog into a twitter feed of obscure holidays.

_OHHI_ alerted me to the fact that it was Elephant Appreciation Day in the comments on my “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” post. Naturally, my first thought was, “Why is there an Elephant Appreciation Day?”. Well, it was started in 1996 by an elephant enthusiast, because

• is the largest land mammal of our era,
• is unique among mammals for its trunk,
• is the most noble of beasts on earth,
• is most undeservedly threatened with extinction,
• has been man’s benefactor in numerous ways throughout history,
• is entertaining and amusing,
• is gentle and friendly,
• contributes to ecosystem development and maintenance,

That is all.

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.