Several people submitted and emailed that Slashdot has won Cool Zine Site of the Year (the page says 1998 but that is definitely wrong- we didn't win squat last year *grin*) from Cool Site of the Day (the original one, not one of the trillion knockoffs) so thanks to everyone who voted for us. A few people emailed me to congratulate me. I guess get a statuette of some form that I can use as a commemorative doorstop or something. Neat. I'll post pictures when it shows up if I'm bored.

Seems like just a few days ago that we announced number 10 million, but here we are again- not only did we break our "Pages in a Single Day" record (was 387,000, but on Tuesday we got 410,000) but this morning at 1:08am EST, a Windows User (who was at least running Gecko *grin*) from bigpond.com was the recipient of the 50 millionth Slashdot page. Yee haw.

Several folks have written in to comment that the Feb issue of Wired (7.02) has the "Slashdot Effect" listed in the jargon watch section. An anonymous reader noted that news.com has an article about domain disputes that mentions Slashdot and the whole ajax.org mess from ages back. And finally, Time Digital has an article that refers to " Slashdot Longhairs" (along with rapid apple partisan and java futurist) to describe how biased MSs recent DOJ witness sounds. I don't have long hair. Do you? Thanks to Matthew Rose for that one.

Neil from CopyLeft wrote in to say that they finally caught up on the flood of Slashdot T-Shirt orders. They're really sorry about the lag- apparently ya'll ordered a lot more then they expected. Anyway they are now geared up to handle sales efficiently so go order a Slashdot shirt if you want to drape yourself in #006666 and blatant advertising, or just want to help support Slashdot. They have shirts with my Don't Fear the Penguins logo too. I'm also hearing rumblings about Hats for the zillions of you who request them. No word yet on Slashdot Undergarments and Ties, but who really wants to wear underwear and ties anyway?

I tell ya, the end of the year is when all the cheesy awards things come out of the woodwork. First off, you can still vote for Slashdot as Cool Site of the Year. First prize is a new guitar (mmmm). Next Newswire has named Slashdot as winner of the "Community" section of it's Big 14 roundup. tapwater wrote in to say that The Guardian ranked us as one of the Top 10 Sites of 98. Modbuster wrote in to tell us that PlanetClick.com gave us 'Coolest Site'. Finally Norman Jordan says that @Home Network gave Slashdot a five star rating and ranked it as the best site overall for 1998.

morph- writes "Happy New Year! At 12:00 AM, 1999 GMT (that's 7:00 PM EST for those of us who can't subtract) we'll be hosting an IRC party on SlashNET (irc.slashdot.org or eu.irc.slashdot.org for you foreigners). We invite you to join us in #slashdot for a night of virtual drinking and dancing (to your favorite MP3s, of course). Hope to see everyone there!" I'm scheduled to be at an actual physical party, but hopefully I'll stumble at some point in the evening, although frankly, I know the #Slashdot crew pretty well, and I fear them dancing. Virtual or otherwise.

You might have noticed Slashdot being a tad laggy during the days (that's putting it mildly). Well that's because we're saturating our T1 solid. A T3 is coming (actually, the T3 is months late, but anyway) but in the meantime, we've got a squid proxy on another connection running that you can use for speedier access. It's up at Cachedot.slashdot.org (once again we name things as painfully as possible) and it should be about 15 minutes behind the main site, but it should be much less saturated. Note that you'll need to relogin out there to get you cookie back, but other than that it should work pretty much transparently.

Once again I have some award things that I feal obligated to mention. If you're not interested, skip down, click the link below to read some mussings on Slashdot CDs and a Slashdot Magazine. I really want feedback on this stuff. The main one is Cool Site of the Year which has a Guitar that I want as First Prize, so go vote. You're allowed to vote every day. Nathan Machula wrote in to tell us that we're once again in ZDNet's Top 100 websites. You'll enjoy the new review of the site. Ngeran wrote in to tell us that Slashdot was on NetCenter's What's New page. We're almost a year and a half old, but they gave us a '9' for content. DPI is doing some award thing for the end of the year. Apparently you can vote for Slashdot, I don't think I win a guitar from this one *grin*. Please click the link below and read the rest of this story. It is quite important to the future of Slashdot sorta stuff

Well folks, I have officially finished my last exam. Assuming I'm not missing anything anywhere, I've earned a B.S. in Computer Science and a Studio Art Minor at Hope College. Now that I've got that whole mess out of the way, my plan is to take it easy for a few weeks, and then I will start my "Job". Basically, I work for my company (Block Stackers Inc: basically Hemos, Me, Nate and Kurt) and my job will be to run Slashdot in the best way I can. It'll kinda be nice to be working only one full time job instead of running Slashdot and full time school. It means new features, better stability, and hopefully the ability to pay my student loans and rent. This site serves close to 8 million pages a month, now I just have to figure out how to make a living at it. Lastly, some folks have actually sent real graduation presents- you know who you are- you rock.Hey, click below if you want our address to send presents.

Slashdot gets a lot of mentions out there, and I'm sick of devoting whole stories to them, so I'm lumping them together. First, I mentioned Cool Site of the Year before, but I just found out that one of the prizes is a New Guitar- so Go vote for us. You can vote once a day, and this is one poll I have no problem Slashdotting *grin*. Cheekyboy wrote in to tell us that we're the #5 site at at 100 Hot's Developer Site List. hatredonalog wrote in to say that the new issue of Linux Journal has Slashdot listed as the #1 Linux Web Page, beating out linux.org. Anonymous Harrison noted that a recent Jerk City cartoon mentions Slashdot. And lastly, the RC5 Team has been doing pretty well these days. In fact, we and the Evangelista's have been swapping the #1 daily keys spot. So go run clients on anything that boots and lets dust 'em.

Well, almost everyone on the planet wrote to let us know that Slashdot has passed Team EvangeLista in daily key processing rates. With the latest stats, it shows it's only a matter of time before we crush and destro-er, pass the competition overall.

So as many of you might already know, the whole Bay Area was without power for 6 hours. And as some others of you might know, San Francisco is where UPNetworks is. And many of you probably know that UPNetworks is where Slashdot is hosted from. But notice that we stayed up? I find it terribly amusing that they have 7 days of backup juice over there. Maybe I'm just slap happy from spending a day in a dark room with all those chemicals. Anyway, thanks to Jesse for the link, and the tails of woe from out there. And thanks to UPN for being cool and keeping juice & bandwidth to our beloved server throughout the outtage. On with the real stuff now.

Matthew Kirkwood wrote in to tell me that Slashdot has been nominated for Cool Site of the Year in the 'Zine catagory. This is from the original, often imitated Cool Site of the Day. "It's just flattering to be nominated yada yada yada". The winner will be determined by a poll on the page.

A couple of you have been asking about the t-shirts. Here's an update:
Thanks to everyone who ordered slashdot and copyleft shirts. To make our lives simpler we are shipping whole orders, so we had to wait until our inventory was replenished, which is now the case except for the "Don't Fear the Penguin Shirts", so if your order had one of those it will be a few days yet. Your credit card will not be billed until we pack and ship your shirts at which time you'll receive an email confirmation. We apologize for the delay, which we anticipated but had no way to avoid. For order status email questions@copyleft.net. And please don't hassle the slashdot guys about the shirts. And if you do want to buy some shirts for the holidays, check out Copyleft.

Well, almost everyone on the planet wrote to tell us that we are now #2 in the RC5 rankings. And with last week's news that Distributed was going Linux, things seem to be cruising along. Except for the sheer size of those blocks. *sigh*

So over the last few months we've grown again. We now are completely saturating the T1. But no fear! Greater bandwidth is just around the corner. Unfortunately, all this extra speed is going to cost us more money, <PLUG> We serve up like 1.5 million pages a week, and we need to start selling more ads to keep going. If you're interested in having an ad shown to the Slashdot audience, you should contact hemos@slashdot.org and ask for the rate card. Our rates are cheap (and even cheaper if you're a Linux company, or buy a lot of impressions) and we've got a great reader base of technically savy readers.</PLUG> Allright, I totally feel like PBS and don't ever want to do this again *grin*, now back to the important stuff.

Welcome to Slashdot, wherein a technologically challenged media critic comes nose to nose with an army of Linux Geeks and lives to tell the tale...

Hit the link below to read a few notes regarding the default threshold, anonymous posting, and the various modes available for comment display. Its fun and exciting for everyone. Or maybe not.

I've attached the logs from last nights IRC Forum on SlashNET. Next time around we'll have somebody interesting to talk to, but if you're curious what I have to say about things, go ahead and click the link. It was nice talking to everyone, we'll do this again sometime I'm sure.

Last minute reminder that your chance to throw virtual pies or virtual beers at my head is today at 6pm (My time:EST) on irc.slashdot.org in #Forum. I'll answer questions about Slashdot or whatever people are interested in. It'll be fun. Next note that I made a significant change to the comments display system last night. This change isn't necessarily permanent, and is definately open to alteration. Some of you have noticed and emailed already about it. Click the link below to read my description and explanation. I'm going to give it a few days, and put it to a poll.