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.

So Jon Katz wrote up a pretty nifty write up of Slashdot. Check it out if you're interested. Its a pretty glowing piece, so everyone pat yourself on the back and then go about your lives as usual. Speaking of Slashdot, just a quick reminder that we've got that IRC forum tomorrow on SlashNET at 6pm eastern. It's your chance to request features that are probably already on my TODO list but I won't have time to write until after graduation or complain about AC posting or cookies and whatnot. Wesley Crusher questions will get you /ignore'd *grin*.

My-Mugs has set us up a page where you can go and order Slashdot Coffee Mugs. So if you want to help keep Slashdot chugging, or just want to drink more coffee but are to lazy to clean any of your existing cups, check it out. Either way is fine by me.

The Opers on SlashNET (the Slashdot IRC network:irc.slashdot.org), desperate for something productive to do, have been planning to run regular forums for awhile now. For some reason, they've decided that the first victi.. err, guest, to be me. Presumably nobody more interesting was available. So I'll be online on Saturday at 6pm Eastern (who am I kidding? I'm normally online, but this time its official) to answer any questions folks have about Slashdot. This is all you ACs chance to insult me in realtime instead of in the comments section! And the rest of you can ask real questions about moderation, scoring, why cookies don't work, or whatever else comes up. You can get some help connecting over at the SlashNET Homepage. Hopefully next time we'll get someone interesting.

So I was greeted this morning to a crazed server- with almost 400 comments, every httpd fork was serving up the MS Memo story and bringing the server to its knees. I think I know how to solve it, and will work on that after classes are done today, but in the mean time, I've disabled viewing replies off the article. I'll reenable it tonight and you guys can read it then. Sorry about the hassle.

Assorted odds and ends to babble about late on a friday night. Read if you feel like it. Ignore if you like. Updates on Slashdot's code etc.

Just figured I'd quick explain what that jobs link is over on the left hand side of the page. There are 3 or 4 extremely common feature requests for Slashdot, and a service to help find jobs is probably #3 (after AC filtering and a mailing list, which both are coming as well). So click that thing if you're interested in employment. I'm not in charge of it, it's run by Developers.Net, I'm merely throwing it up here because of the huge number of people who asked for something like this on Slashdot. So if you're an unemployed bum, and want to alter that have at it.

I've got several misc. comments to babble about related to Slash, Slashdot, and whatever else I think of before my ISP times me out (this will also answer the mystery of the (score:x) thing that several of you have emailed about), so click the link below to read it if you're interested.