This is your last chance to enter Slashdot's T-Shirt Design Contest that we announced a few weeks ago. The contest officially ends tomorrow. We've had over 200 submissions, and some of them are pretty cool, but I don't think there yet is a Lock for the winner. So if you've got what it takes to design a T-Shirt (we're too cheap/lazy to do it ourselves!) you can win store credit at ThinkGeek plus free shirts with your winning design on them! Here are the Official Rules. Read the original story for submission details.

It's been some time since we had a new shirt design for folks to buy, and it's time to change that. More specific guidelines for the contest follow, but in short, we're taking design submissions starting immediately. Winners will get a $75 credit at ThinkGeek, as well as 3 copies of of their t-shirt design. Winners will be chosen by me.

Tonight on irc.slashnet.org in #Forum Hemos & I will be hanging out answering users' questions. This is your chance to ask about the moderation system, story selection, or the technology upon which Slashdot is built. (No Biz questions please ;) It's been a long time since we last did this, and we're hoping we can answer questions and get some feedback on some new ideas too. We'll see ya there.

We're pleased to announce the newest reason for you to subscribe to Slashdot. Besides the ability to suppress banner ads, limit journal postings to friends, and a few plums, Subscribers now see stories posted on Slashdot from The Mysterious Future! These stories are recognizable by the red title bar, and the lack of a time stamp. Subscribers will be able to beat the rush and read the links before everyone else. You can hit the link below and I'll explain exactly what this means. If this appeals to you, you could read the subscriber FAQ or just go subscribe.

fuzzel writes "Even though Slashdot has run a number of articles about IPv6 (1|2|3) it apparently isn't reachable over IPv6 directly. But for the people that do already have IPv6 they can use http://slashdot.org.sixxs.org and they will be automaticaly gatewayed. This trick works for most sites by simply appending .sixxs.org to the domain part of a url, eg http://www.google.com.sixxs.org, the gateway will the rewrite url's to have it appended automatically so that everything goes over IPv6. Full information is available on http://ipv6gate.sixxs.net. Oh and yes if you don't have IPv6, those domains under sixxs.org won't work :)"

Gizmo Kid asks: "How many of you Californian, full-time, software programmers are getting paid overtime? From what I understand, a law in California, passed within the last two years, says that software engineers who make less than $41/hour [PDF version] are required to be paid for overtime? Are your employers following the rules? I'm not sure mine is?"

We're up and running on the new cluster at Exodus West. The hardware configuration is almost identical to what we had on the east coast, just a few time zones over. No doubt we'll be working out a few kinks over the next few days, so hang in there. Now that that's over with, please continue swimming naked.

As I mentioned yesterday, Slashdot is moving from Exodus East to West. This will be happening at around 11pm Eastern. We hope the downtime will be relatively minimal, but DNS may be a little slower to catch up. You can use brak.slashdot.org for a few days if your DNS is slow to catch up to reality. Hopefully we'll see you on the other side. Hopefully. In the meantime talk amongst yourselves. Here's a topic: Is Agent-X Deadpool?

We're moving the Slashdot cluster from Exodus East to Exodus West in the next couple days. In good Slashdot Tradition, we've opened up brak.slashdot.org for you to help load test the new cluster. Currently its almost an exact copy of our existing setup (missing a couple of webheads which will be up soon). The actual move will occur late at night (most likely tonight or tomorrow depending on how things go), and will hopefully involve only a few minutes of downtime as we copy the last of the data over the continent. Thanks for your help.

Jacob asks: " I have recently left a consulting/training firm to work in the public sector as a contractor. Part of my job functionality includes analyzing network traffic and security. This of course includes using products such as ethereal, snort, ntop and other network sniffers/analyzers. While working as a consultant I was legally covered by the company in which I worked for. Since I am no longer working for that company I do not have that same protection and I am worried about the possibility of being accused of 'sniffing passwords' or 'viewing confidential data' as a result of a normal network analysis. What is your experience in creating a legally binding contract or permission forms to perform network analysis and/or security audits?"

As much as I avoid discussing Slashdot on Slashdot, I figured I'd just take a moment to say that Slashdot is 5 years old now. I've written a Journal Entry with a few more comments on the subject. And yes we know we jumped the shark about a week after we registered the domain name, but we just don't care! Here's hoping we're here 5 years from now doing exactly the same thing with the same folks. (As a side note, due to a data importing bug, we really don't know exactly when we made our debut, but I spent september 97 putting the site together... and when we went live, we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!)

StArSkY wonders: "I just had a quick look at the Team Slashdot page on the SETI site, and it looks as though only about 10% of the names are still active participants. Does Slashdot have limited patience? Have the Men In Black movies dulled our sense of commitment to the search for alien life? Or do we just rebuild our PC's too often and forget to reinstall the SETI client? For those of you who are interested, 'Team Slashdot' is currently ranked 27th in total results returned, and when I was typing this, we only needed another 6003 results to reach 1 million. Now that would be a huge achievement. So all of you Slashdotters out there with dormant SETI accounts get fired up, install the client, and get back to using those idle CPU cycles." not two days later, cybrpnk2 writes in with this update: "This week Team Slashdot becomes only the 28th registered group to process one million work units (basic blocks of radio data). Since the entire SETI@Home project has processed only around 600 million work units total, Slashdotters have made a pretty significant contribution to the overall project. Kudos to all involved, particularly slashdotter Mike Hardy for his team-leading contribution of over 23,000+ work units." A big hearty "Thanks!" to all current and future members of Team Slashdot. You guys rock!

davidmcn asks: "There is an overabundance of solutions available for the Microsoft brand of operating systems which allow the mapping of zip-codes to congressional districts. However, I work for a small consulting firm that works primarily with Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL, and would like to find a way to take address information, and create mailings based on Congressional Mappings. Does anyone know of a solution that is available for a linux enviroment? Even something as simple as a list of Congressional Districts and all zip codes underneath them would suffice."

Several readers sent in notes about their Slashdot Meetup experiences; we'll start with tuxedo-steve 's report from Melbourne: "Just a quick wrapup from the Melbourne, Australia /. Meetup. We ran into problems due to the assigned meeting place being closed at the scheduled meetup time, but ended up getting a fair few people (20-30 probably) herded up before moving to a bar that would provide us with service. A good night ensued, fueled by tech-related conversation and a fair amount of beer for those so inclined. For those yet to have their meetup, be sure your meeting place is going to be open!" Below are a few more local reports -- feel free to add yours in the comments.

Just a little reminder that Slashdot meetup is today! Sorry to the folks on the other side of the dateline for not posting this earlier. Check it out at slashdot.meetup.com we've had some 5000 people register all over the world so we thought a reminder ping was in order. The original story is available too. We won't be there this month as we're at OSCON today. But we'll be there next month perhaps. If you do go to a meetup put in a submission about it and we'll do a wrapup tonight or tomorrow sometime.

Thread writes "This group is getting together slashdot readers all over the world. Check out slashdot.meetup.com to meet up with Slashdot readers in your town." The meetup.com site is pretty much brand new, and it's a fun idea. We thought this was kind of a cool idea and something a bunch of people have asked for in email and in past stories so we thought "let's see what happens."

J.J. Lee asks: "I must say that I'm truly touched. I've just read some of the peoples' response to the System Administrators - College or Career? posting and I found it very encouraging that people have posted selfless, useful, encouraging and helpful advice to a complete stranger. I've been a Slashdot devotee for about a year now and I know this wasn't the first time I felt proud to be in such a community. The responses (for the most part) were well though out and had a genuine concern for this young fellow. Would the Slashdot community be willing to come together for an annual convention or event? If so, what would be the theme and what talks would a convention like this have? Just thought it might be great to meet some people and get to know each other on a non-virtual level." I've been doing Ask Slashdot for somewhere close to 5 years, and it's been one of the best experiences of my life. I sure wouldn't mind meeting some of the faces behind the nicknames (particularly this "Anonymous Coward" chap), what about you? If not a huge convention, would local get-togethers be more your speed?

Victor Cruz writes "If there is one thing I can't stand, it's watching a bunch of rich, fat, overpaid, overhyped dot-con executives blathering on and on about some "business lessons" they supposedly learned while they were out wasting millions of dollars of venture capitalists' money. When I came across Teresa Esser's new book, "The Venture Cafe: Secrets, Strategies, and Stories from America's High-Tech Entrepreneurs," I thought it was going to be that same thing all over again." Read on for the dramatic conclusion!

A few things have changed in the Slashdot Subscription System since we originally announced it a few months ago. Most important to many of you is that we now can directly accept Credit Cards in addition to paypal. We also added some control to allow subscriptions to be time based instead of page view based. Read on to see how.

The IRC forum with CmdrTaco and Hemos is now complete, and a log has been posted. They answered quite a few questions about Slashdot's subscription system, bigger ads, and other assorted stuff. Don't miss the question about pop-up ads.