Penguicon is just a few weeks away and I'm really looking forward to it... I've got copies of studio Sokodei's fandubs en route for the show, so we'll be watching Fanboy Bebop, ReDeath, and Nescaflowne. I'll also be doing a couple panels, and at least one Slashdot specific panel. Last year we had a LOT of people show up, and had to quit only because the room was usurped. This year we'll figure something better out. The show is held in Novi (sorta between detroit and ann arbor) so if you're in eastern michigan, consider coming. I'm hoping to arrange some sort of Slashdot gathering at the show but don't know if we're talking about 5 guys or 50, so help me out if you're interested in participating. It may be as simple as hanging out in the hotel bar for an hour or something. I don't really know, but I'm open to ideas.

A few weeks ago we brought hardware.slashdot.org online with relatively little fanfare. Like IT before it, it representes little in the way of new content, but it will offer users a way of finding specific subject matter. I was supposed to have 'entertainment.slashdot.org' up around the same time, but this has gone poorly. So here is a bunch of logos that Kathleen & I worked out for the section. We never found one that we really liked... so I'm throwing this out as a challange to any of you readers... try to design an entertainment logo... it needs to have the curve, and the word 'Slashdot' in the font Caliseo in it. Colors, backgrounds, everything else is up for grabs. I promise at least a t-shirt if we use your design (plus the immeasurable value of me plugging you in my journal... you can almost smell the 31337).

I'm actually travelling a lot in the next few weeks. Penguicon, California, Cleveland, Tokyo, and possibly Vegas. 5 trips in about 7 weeks. The new Pokemon emerald comes out in a few weeks, so that could keep me company on long flights... otherwise I may have to buy a PSP. I've resisted so far. It's taken every oz. of willpower I don't have. Me want. Me want much.

I was sick all weekend. Some sort of cold/sinus thing that kept me pretty well on my ass. The upside is that I had some cool stuff to watch on ye old boob tube... lately I've been watching Bab 5 on DVD. I'm shamed to admit that I've never watched this show before. I've been netflixing the discs, and thought the show wholey mediocre. Then like around episode 7 they had a really good episode. Kathleen has seen the whole series years ago and was really pimping the show to me... and since the first half dozen episodes were mediocre or bad, well she was pleased that we finally hit "Good" stuff. Now I'm looking forward to seeing there the show goes. Of course, with 102 more episodes, I imagine it will be a year before I get through them all!

Last week I animated a short commercial. You'll be able to see it soon enough. But this has really got my animation bug on again. Last fall Big Rob & I wrote a screenplay for shits and giggles... we tried to shoot it ourselves with friends. Unfortunately there were several problems- like the fact that we have one camera, and the sound was awful, oh and we can't act worth shit. I cut together one and a half scenes and it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to work out how we wanted.

Now I'm thinking more about trying to animate that script, or at least use it as a launching point for something based on the same characters. I have some stylistic ideas about how to do it. The original script was really funny: It was originally staged as a sort of pseudo reality TV thing, we were watching a lot of Trailer Park Boys at the time, and thought that the format could work well with our characters and setting.

If animated, the whole thing needs to be changed up a bit... for starters, since the animation quality will be pretty shitty, some of the physical gags need to be rewritten or removed. We'll need to focus more on the dialog and less on the actions of the characters in order for me to reasonably be able to animate the whole thing more or less alone. Practically speaking the original script was set in reality. Animation gives us a lot more flexibility about how we define "reality" in the show.

It'll likely be months before I have anything to show for it since we'll be operating at the speed of hobby unless some Slashdot reader is actually the president of CBS or something. No? Didn't think so. You bastards.

Penguicon is coming up again, and I'm looking forward. This will be my third year attending the show. I'm supposedly going to do a panel or speech or something, but I don't exactly know for sure what will be expected of me. What I do know is that I shall drink beer. Hang out with nice people. And maybe catch a few panels. If you're in eastern michigan, you might really enjoy it. Kathleen claims she's going to wear her halloween costume at least once during the show. My wife is hot.

I'm working on a short video that I need to embed into a web page. I know a fair bit about the various codecs and platforms, but I'm really struggling with what is the most compatible way to do this. I've toyed with divx, quicktime, avis and various mpg variations. I'm trying to get 30 seconds down to a meg, and have it render within the browser window.

What experiences do people have with this? For testing it I'm simply using the EMBED tag and a sorneson encoded quicktime file. It's simple, and works on windows boxes that have QT properly installed, but I really want it to work on Linux, Firefox, and (sadly) MSIE.

Email if you have comments.

One of the most common requests I get today is to bring Slashdot up to date with modern web technologies like CSS & XHTML. People ask this question in a variety of ways ranging from the accusatory and conspiratorial to the flat out mean. Some fairly elaborate conspiracies have been suggested to me, usually involving me taking money from someone or another in exchanging for not updating Slashdot's core HTML. And often people just say we're lazy. And thats true, but only to a point.

The truth is that bringing Slashdot into the modern era of web design would please me beyond measure. It is unfortunately, non-trivial to do this. We already have a highly templated system under the hood here, so for many parts of our code maintenance, it isn't that necessary. But at the end of the day, smaller pages that render compatibly over many platforms trumps anything else.

A few projects have tried over the years to CSSify Slashdot, but they rarely go the distance. They take the first steps... like showing Slashdot's Index in CSS. Of course that can be done. And in fact, it's relatively easy. I took a crack at it myself last summer and in a few hours had duplicated the index without any real problem.

But thats just the first step. Slashdot has dozens of pages with unique formatting. Some of these are used by many users, like, oh, for example this journal that you're looking at. It won't require a lot of custom CSS to make it work, but it'll take some. Also there's the difference between logged in users and anonymous cowards. There are a number of user interface differences. The real kicker is the administrative functionality. Most users don't understand the depth of functionality hidden under the hood of Slashdot for managing not just submissions and story editing, but countless pages for countless bits of functionality throughout the site.

Of course, a lot of that admin specific functionaltiy can be ignored for a later date, and no doubt thats exactly what we'll do..

When the core xhtml is done, we also will need to do CSS style templates for each of the subsections on Slashdot, as well as each of the Slash based sites at OSTG that might also wish to partake in the CSS goodness.

Fortunately for us, Wes, OSTGs super HTML pimp is going to take a crack at actually making a proper CSS/xHTML layout for Slashdot. From there, we can put static pages up to make sure that it is compatibile with the various browsers out there. Then we can move on to actually making Slashdot use that new code...

Thats all underway now. I'd love to hear feedback, but I'd rather someone jsut handed us feature complete templates... not just "The First Steps". I bet a dozen people have taken the first steps. Look at my proof of concept! See it can be done! Don't get me wrong- thats swell.. but showing someone that you can walk is a lot different then telling them 'Great, now walk to philly and get me a cheesesteak'

(Standard mod system musings apply... I'm just ranting on thoughts about Slashdot's mod system. Nothing here is set in stone. These are just ideas that I'm mulling around.)

Karma doesn't work very well on Slashdot. The reason for that is really because it is tracking 2 seperate, and largely unrelated things: Posting & Moderating. The moderation system already seperates these things: moderation evaluates comments, and meta moderation evaluates the moderators. The former determines "Score" of comments, and the latter determines who gets more mod points in the future.

Unfortunately both of these systems use "Karma" as a key value in making their respective determinations. This kinda sucks.

It makes sense that we create a new variable, which right now I'm calling "Influence" to track a user's effectiveness as a moderator. Karma would continue to exist, but it would try instead to track your effectiveness as a poster.

Influence would instead track your moderation, more specifically your fairness rating in meta moderation. And the idea here would be to find the users who are the very best moderators, for more on *why* see my previous journal on rockstar moderators.

The new mod system will internally track comment scores as floats... so a user with a high influence could weigh more heavily then a user with low influence. An insightful from a user with 200 unanimous fair meta moderations under his belt could cause a comment to rise in score more than Joe Newbie who just got mod points for the first time today. But a single unfair moderation from our super user will cause him to lose much influence.

I also think there's something to be said about changing many of the numbers in slashcode from absolutes, to percentiles. This holds true in discussions (Score -1..5 is limited... we should instead be looking for percentiles... the best NN comments, the 10th percentile etc) as well as Karma... "Excellent" karma is not a static thing... it should instead refer to users being in the top NN% of all our actively posting users. The Karma Bonus should only be available to some "Best" percentile of users. Likewise, influence should be doled out in percentiles as well. But it's important to balance the system by increasing the penalties appropriately. If a user in the 90th percentile has the ability to move a comment score 10x more than a user in the 0th percentile, then his penalties should also be 10x as great. With great power comes great responsibiltiy!

The idea is that the very best moderators will have more power: perhaps gaining mod points faster, or else rate comments higher/faster than other users... but if they screw up, they should fall much faster.

Another interesting side effect of this is that we could give mod points to more users... but just have their "Influence" very low. We could use this to test their effectiveness. Here are some totally random numbers to try to explain what I'm getting at:

Joe has moderated 500 comments, and 499 of them are rated fairly. He is in the 99th percentile of Slashdot moderators. He gets mod points every 2-3 days. If he mods a comment 'Insightful' it goes from score 1 to 5 immediately. But if he gets modded unfairly, he will drop far... perhaps to the 50th percentile. From there his moderations only move comments up 1 point.

Bob has never moderated before. He gets his first mod points, and he actually only causes comments to move up .1. In other words, no meaningful effect at all (well, not exactly, since the new system is all floats, that could actually matter, but thats not what I'm getting at here). Anyway, he is meta moderated fairly, and with each passing 'Fair' his "Influence" increases a little bit. An unfair rating causes him to fall a bit, but since he has so little influence to begin with, its not that far... at least not the first time anyway... if a pattern is determined, he loses mucho influence. After a dozen fair mods, his moderations can move a comment by 1 or more.

The idea is as always, to keep damage control on high: if Joe goes outta wack, he's penalized hard and fast. But if he always mods well, he slowly rises in the rankings, and he can moderate more., and have his moderations weigh more in score calculation. Likewise, now we have a good way to determine if Bob will be a fair moderator. He can be "Ramped Up" as he earns it. This means we can give *more* users mod points. Encouraging more participation in the system, but weighing the newbies lighter than the old hands. That way the moderation system can move faster since trusted users will have more points, but newbies can participate. Sorta like a training period where mistakes aren't penalized as harshly.

Just a short trip to Boston. Barely 48 hours. LinuxWorld in Boston has its flaws... the main flaw being "Not New York". I really love a trip to NY. I love to try to find a show to see or a fantastic dinner somewhere. Tradeshows are tradeshows, and they really are pretty much the same no matter what the subject matter is or where they are, so for me its more about people that I meet... old friends or new ones.

The show itself was fine- as is typical for LinuxWorld, the talks aren't as technical as I generally am looking for. For my time, I'd prefer an OSCON to a LinuxWorld in terms of raw 'Learning Stuff'. Case in point- Jay Beale from the bastille project gave a packed room a talk on the honeynet project... the speech was fine, but he spent the entire time discussing what a honeynet was, and what the project is. Now, I would imagine that, given the packed room, everyone KNOWS what a honeynet is... we're there for the juicy details: he spoke of having a psychiatrist on the project... but we didn't get to hear about the juicy stuff they GET from that. Tell me about the psychological profiles collected. Discuss what new tools the script kiddies are using. What sorts of attacks are gaining popularity? I guess I want less of 'What was it' and more of 'What they do'. I guess I'll just have to reading the juicy stuff on the web ;)

My own BOF went well, although there seemed to be something of a Snafu at the start... this BOF wasn't given a lecture room, but instead put into a lounge... plus they scheduled 2 BOFs in the same room at the same time... worst of all, my arch nemesis, the evil Brian "Krow" Aker was the other guy. Ooooo I hate him soooo muuuuch! Oh wait, no I don't :) I did my usual Q&A sorta thing. Some good questions but I wish I could do BOFs more focused on improving the moderation system, but only a tiny percentage of Slashdot readers truly understand it, so its hard to do that in a forum like a BOF. I can't exactly require a questionaire before you get to ask questions to guarantee that you understand the subtleties of the system ;)

After hearing words from many people (mostly Nate) saying The O.C. is good I finally decided to see for myself. I've now watched 15 episodes in the last 2 weeks and I finally have made my decision- it's just a flat out good show. Often it's simply soap opera brain candy, but I'm constantly amused by the accurate cultural stuff I see in the show. They play video games and talk about stuff I like. Characters are frequently named with not-so-sly comic book references... still no Slashdot reference tho... a clear oversight I'm willing to overlook... for now... but I've got my eye on you Josh Schwartz!

I almost forgot to mention that I'll be at LinuxWorld in Boston next week giving a BOF session Wednesday early evening. I've got the room for 90 minutes, so show up and ask your questions about Slashdot and I'll try to lie quickly on my feet to disguise the fact that I'm utterly clueless and lame. But hey, at least I talk really fast and sometimes make with the funny.

Last night I woke up at 2:30 AM and couldn't fall back asleep pretty much all night. I think I finally dozed off around 7am... just in time to get up ~7:15 to be at work by 7:30. Not a particularly pleasant way to spend a night. I typically am a pretty sound sleeper so this was pretty unusual. After an hour or two in bed I moved to the couch and read some comic books. Then I startled a cat who knocked over a lamp breaking a light bulb. Really soothing relaxing night 'stuff 'eh? Stupid purring cats.

Someone tried to sell slashdot.cn on eBay along with some other domains. No bids. Not even their 7 cent start. We were hoping it would go for like $25, then we'd wait for the transfer, and then slap a trademark claim on it and get it back. That would be funny. Maybe a little mean tho ;)

So I'm curious if anyone out there has seen any real research (not just anecdotal crap) in trying to figure out accurate user counts... like, the average number of IPs used by an individual online over say, a week.

I know lots of strange stats for Slashdot: 321,000 IPs viewed the index yesterday. I also know that some IPs are shared by hundreds of users (like the time we accidentally banned microsoft's proxy server ;) and I know that some people hop IPs like crazy. But it seems like all of those numbers could be melted together to get a real true 'Average'. If the "Average" user uses 3.5 IPs/week, then we could take a rough stab at translating unique IPs into actual numbers of people viewed.

So what i'm looking for is scholarly research on that sort of thing. Anyone see anything? I know these numbers will vary tremendously from place to place... like I imagine Slashdot is doubly skewed: I bet we have a high density of users with static IPs... a static IP is sort of a thing of the past... something generally now more rare since most consumer level networks have gone to DHCP... but Slashdot readers would like to have DNS and services, so they'd be more likely to sit on the same IP over a long stretch of time. On the other hand, they also would be likely to have multiple devices, so I could see a single user checking Slashdot from their handheld, their laptop, desktop and office.

Anyway, I'm going to try to figure out some numbers here for us, but I'm curious what others have bumped into. You can email me if you can't post.

Jamie has been pushing hard on this point, and I'm leaning towards agreeing with him now. Essentially, what he wants to do is make it possible for a moderator to leave a note with their moderation, explaining *why* the comment was moderated. This note is made available only to meta moderators, to help aid them in deciding if the moderation was fair or not. Essentially I'd be looking for very short explanations like 'calling someone a nazi is not nice' to justify a flamebait mod or something.

The down side is that this slightly increases the potential burden on moderators... but our moderators are only modding a few points every few days or weeks, so we're talking about a burden on the order of typing a couple dozen words once a week. I do more than that just telling people to 'read the FAQ' in my inbox with my morning cup of coffee.

The chance for abuse is relatively light. We desire the system to remain anonymous, and a moderator could conceivably leave a note saying "I'm user ID XXX, so moderate me fair" however if meta moderators are warned that anonymity is part of the system, that might work against them (assuming meta moderators read directions).

Another related issue that I'd love to address someday is 'Funny' meta moderation. Nobody has the balls to call something 'NOT FUNNY' and that frusterates me. I think we should be VERY hard on usage of 'Funny' in moderation. An ATTEMPT at funny that is NOT funny should NOT be given a score bonus. And a moderator who says something that is moderately amusing when it is not should probably be given fewer moderator points. The problem is that meta moderators don't like saying funny is unfair. They think "Yeah, this is ok. It's kinda funny. Or they tried. So I'll mark it as fair". I think this is a great example of where some slight changes could help the system out. Stand up! Be proud! If something is NOT funny, call the moderation unfair!

This is something that Jamie & I have discussed extensively for the mod rewrite. By splitting the scoring system up into multiple modes, we have a lot of new options. One cool idea is to split funny up into several sub groups: "Hilarious" "Amusing" and "Not Funny". We could play a lot with those in meta moderation... like if something is 'Hilarious' then it should alsu be amusing, and definitely not NOT funny. So we could do some fancy schmancy number crunching to get better results out of this.

But mostly, I just would like to encourage meta moderators to be more liberal with the funny unfair tag. Countless recurring memes in the forums draw occasional, random 'Funny' mods. This wastes mod points, meta moderator time, and only serves to dilute the discussions. So many jokes that get a funny point here or there simply AREN'T funny. Meta moderators, have the balls to call something UNfunny!

Only once in a great while does a game come along that really tickles me the way that Katamari Damacy does. Now I must admit that I was skeptical, but when Kathleen asked for it for christmas, I was happy to oblige... I've long felt that video games make great xmas presents, because I can also play them. Of course, I think I've done a disservice to her because I've spent as much time playing this thing as she has.

The game is loaded with ludicrous engrish translations... sorta like Parappa. The music is cute and fun. The game play is unbelievably addictive. You roll your "Katamari" around and stuff sticks to it. Your "Score" is essentially the diameter of your katamari. When you start out you'll be rolling up thumb tacks and crayons and eventually pop cans, plants, and eventually cats, dogs, people, cows, cars, houses, and eventually (I assume) battleships.

The game play is so easy, and so simple. But what makes it fun is the constantly shifting perspective. The game doesn't change, you just get bigger... so the box that was a wall 5 minutes ago is now food for your katamari. And you come back later and grab the entire table that the box was sitting on. Later you can return and take the whole house!

It's a PS2 game, and you owe it to yourself to take a look. It's just "One of those games" that has the right mix of cute, fun and colorful, combined with a unique concept that just makes it absolutely shine. It made me pause Knights of the Old Republic 2, and that's saying something.

Slashdot's traffic continues to grow. Recently we set a new single day traffic record of just shy of 4.3 million pages. Even our average days are now around 3.5M. We were around 3 million pages last summer. We're not really sure where the traffic came from. Referrals from Yahoo's RSS definitely is a factor, and our referrals from google also seemed to have grown, but those numbers don't account for the 10-15% growth we're talking about. Strange things.

Cliff Lampe has written a paper which will soon be published where he did a bunch of research on Slashdot new users. The single point that this paper really drives home is the importance of feedback. Slashdot has 2 primary mechanisms of feedback for new users: Moderation, and Replies. Users who get positive are more likely to continue on to get good karma. Of course, this might be only an indicator of their natural ability to write good comments, but I think the idea is worth exploring. We've planned the future moderation system to handle this, but I don't really have any idea of what the results will be. Comparing the Data Cliff recorded and analyzed for this paper to any data from the new system will be very apples to oranges, so I'm wondering if it makes sense to try to kludge something into the system now.

So what i was thinking was something like this: We add a column to the comments table... comments.noob. I don't know how we define it, but my guess is a noob is someone who has posted less than 2 comments, has been moderated less than 2 times, and has a life time reply total of less than 2. I don't know what the real numbers are, but you get the idea.

Then we give certain users access to a new threshold... right now we have -1..5... we add 'Noob' if you are a moderator, or perhaps if you have excellent karma. This would then encourage moderators and experiences readers to be able to find them. We're talking about dozens of comments/day here, so the burden would be relatively trivial.

Patches?

LotR:RotK EE shipped today. It will be in my grubby little mits in the next day or two. I imagine the 10 hours of bonus crap will keep me well occupied for some time... and between that and Knights of the old Republic II, I think this will be a merry christmas indeed!

So kathleen & I have been looking at moving to a much smaller place, which means we need to move some stuff... one of the single biggest things I have to move is ~500 anime DVDs. Tons of great stuff in there. The problem is that that many DVDs would take absolutely forever to list individually on eBay or Amazon or something. And shipping hundreds of DVDs individually would be ludicrously time consuming. I'm not looking to make a huge amount of cash, in fact, store credit somewhere that sells something I want would be fantastic. Does anyone have any ideas? There are local places in Ann Arbor that will exchange old games for store credit. And I'm keeping my mammoth CD collection- but I'm putting it into storage I think since they are all MP3s now anyway.

I also have a number of professionally framed and matted cels. A lot of those I'm going to keep, but I probably need to move half of them. Anyone know of a good way to do that? At that level, eBay might be cool since we'd only be talking about 10-15 pieces as opposed to the *hundreds* above.

It's been quite awhile since I put words into this TEXTAREA field. Since then I did an appearance on The Screen Savers (which has since all but been cancelled as G4 tries to figure out what to do with the TechTV assets). I have mixed feelings on that whole thing. I've met several of the people who worked on the show and they seem sincere, but at the end of the day, I don't find TSS particularly watchable. I think the real problem is quite simply that I am to far over the other side of the techie bell curve... their audience is the average computer user to the power user and I eat/breath/sleep technology. When I turn on my TV, I'd rather watch CSI or Mythbusters ;)

I spoke at Georgia Tech a few weeks ago too, which was the last of like 5 trips I had in a 4 week period. That went really surprisingly well- it's cool to have a talk when there are several people who really get what Slashdot is. Some people have really drank the kool aid with regards to Slashdot and are simply fans. Others can see beyond that hype and really see Slashdot and objectively see its strengths and weaknesses, and we had a few of those. Those are the talks I actually gain something from. Had a good time with Tammy & Mandrake who I only get to see a couple times a year now that we all don't go to every single Linux Conference that pops up.

My iPod (a 3G 40 gig one, acquired only weeks before the 60 gig iPod Photo was released. Damn you apple!) doesn't seem to work with a USB cable connected to my iMac following 10.3.6. This irritates me because I use it to shuttle large files back and forth between the office. It's not convenient to drag a cable with me.

In Slashdot news, our traffic has continued to rise, and just like every time, nobody is more surprised than me. Our unique IP counts now routinely exceed 500,000/day. We're serving 3.5M pages on most weekdays. Jamie & I have spent a fair bit of time designing the 'Big Picture' for the new moderation system... most of the concepts have already been outlined in previous journal entries, so read backwards if you're curious.

There will most likely be some very controversial changes... we've talked about eliminating the Score:-1 to 5 threshold system. Its confusing, limited, and extremely non scalable. We've also talked about removing the *dozens* of options that only 2% of our readers use and only 1% understand, and instead replacing them both with a few very simple choices... viewing modes or viewing styles or reading preferences or something. User option all really simplify down to options that make the page bigger or longer, and options that focus or unfocus the discussion. Instead of giving users 28 checkboxes and drop downs, we'll give them a handful of big picture options.

Moderation itself will internally change quite a bit. Right now there's a tangled ball of spagetti code wound so tight that it could easily have its own gravity. We need to replace that with a few tables... a table of events (comment moderated 'Informative', meta moderation ruled unfair etc) a table of repurcussions (karma goes up, ac posting disabled etc) so that we can more easily maintain what is an incredibly convoluted set filters that control moderation and posting.

We'll also have the option to revisit our mod labels. The ones we have are problematic. Some are redundant. Others require more discussion context rendering M2 difficult. One cool thing we came up with is that we'll be able to have context sensitive mod labels. This means we could have specific moderation labels that maybe only apply in a Call for Interview Questions... "Good Question"... or even crazy ideas like "Conservative" & "Liberal" for the politics section. The possibility for these options is endless, exciting, and a helluva lot better than a poor moderator being frusterated trying to figure out if a comment is Informative, Insightful, or Interesting. What was I thinking?

The last part will be a rewrite of the threading system so that threads better retain context through moderation. So good replies slide up and hopefully readers still get contextual comments. There's several complicated HTML issues, some UI ones, and a host of technical problems that need solving. If anyone knows of any forums out there that do a really good job presenting the data, I'd love to see them. We're open to any reasonable web technology... I hope to build this all with CSS, which will anger some folks, but I think we're well past the line where CSS is the only fair choice.

As always, you can email me if you have comments.

Our talk at google seemed to go pretty well. I was surprised at the number of people who showed up to hear what we had to say, especially considering what little we actually HAD to say. Seems like a pretty cool work environment. The free food everywhere would scare the crap out of me- it took me most of 2004 to lose 30 of the 40 lbs overweight that I am. But more power to them I guess. There's a cool energy in there. Very different from most offices that I've spent any real time in. But it was great to see some old friends (Hey Chris, San, Bones) and just hang out a little.

I saw Team America World Police last night at a sneak screening audience in Ypsi last night. It was a little strange for me since Paramount actually emailed me and asked if I would go as part of some marketing campaign for bloggers to see the movie. Now I've written dozens of movies reviews on Slashdot (and before that, Chips & Dips featured movie reviews has a huge portion of its content) but this is the first time a studio ever actually invited me to see a free movie. Now Slashdot has a half a million daily readers, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but hey, it's been 7 years. I'll have a complete review of the movie to post on Slashdot soon, but the short summary is that I laughed a lot. And Kathleen who went to the film almost against her will, ready to hate whatever she saw, totally sick of South Park, actually laughed harder than me. Scary. Full review tomorrow, I hope. Maybe Tuesday at the latest because...

Tomorrow I fly out at like 8am to LA to be on The Screen Savers. And pretty much as soon as that is done, I hop back on an airplane and fly straight back. The first time in years I've flown somewhere and back again in the same day. Not my favorite thing, thats for sure. On the other hand, the airplane time will let me write my movie review, and perhaps collect a few more Pokemon. As jeff likes to say, it's not a suggestion really, you GOT to catch them all. The marketing says so. I almost never turn on my game boy when I'm at home, but when I travel, it's like my little blue buddy, providing me with soothing beeps and colorful pictures... tranquilizing me and helping me contain my rage at being trapped inside the steel cylinder 30,000 feet straight up and a thousand miles from my wife, cats, computer, and tivo.