As one of the many faceless among the masses, I also offer my humble thanks for your work, Rob. I graduated HS in 1997, and between working between my first intern job and starting college, the sysadmin at my company suggested I start looking at a site called Slashdot. I followed the site ever since, mostly by directly visiting and in recent years by RSS feed. Over the years I've been exposed to countless meme's, in-jokes, hated authors, anonymous cowards, and definitely the most entertaining and pertinent technology opinions and articles that I've ever had the pleasure of reading. As a CS student, Slashdot encouraged me to get involved with Linux, PHP, and MySQL to create my own CMS, and I thank you for that inspiration. I'm glad to say that we did have a chance to at least meet briefly while the Atlanta area still hosted annual Linux user events (though most times we crossed paths it was when you greenlit my article submissions). Personally, I think you and Slashdot helped set the bar for many technologies and trends to come later: user-submitted and moderated stories (Reddit/Digg), you shared your life with us before it became the social norm (Facebook/Twitter), and produced a fanbase of techies hungry for emerging technologies (like Google, as you mentioned). There is so much more that I can ramble on about, but I'll stop there and just say thank you.

I'm curious as to the continued widespread use of "flatter than a pancake" as a technical unit of measure, considering that a specific mm width and length were just previously mentioned. Not to be a nitpicker, I just prefer my pancakes to be somewhat light and fluffy, and therefore not flat. Perhaps "flatter than a tortilla" would be more apt? Though if we're going this route, I continue to back the opinion that "shitload" be considered a unit of measure ;)

I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing a few shops in my time. What, are they borrowing an algorithm from 4chan?

Announcer: "...Number 3, in a quantum finish!"
Farnsworth: "No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!"

You can definitely have a full-fledged linux environment on one of the DNS-323 or DNS-321 NAS units from D-Link. Basically you just drop 1 file into your root directory, reboot, and you have telnet access. From there you can pretty much install anything in the repository of pre-compiled binaries. I switched from a 4-bay server tower to this little NAS about a year ago, and I haven't had any issues. I eventually want to get another, though right now I don't have the need. See http://wiki.dns323.info/ for info.

A while back I switched to all USB chargers for my gadgets. I found a USB adapter for my Nintendo DS (charges both the Lite and older "phat" model) and my cellphone, and a 3rd-party charger for my iPod. Since I normally travel with my laptop, I can charge my devices from that during the day. However, the NDS charger came with a car adapter that has a USB socket, so I could use that to charge a device while on the road. And my iPod charger came with a tiny wall-wart that also has a USB socket, so I could use household current to charge as well. So my only problem now is that I have maybe 3 different types of cables floating around in my gadget bag, but at least I've dropped all the bulky chargers.