I'm digging G+ more and more. Feel free to add me to your whatever circles. I have a "/.ers" circle.
I did have teh lulz...
I just received mail notification that a fellow user has bought me a gift subscription to slashdot. I'm already friends/fans with the person but his email address isn't visible so I can't thank the person off-/. (wimp, change your privacy settings and deal with the spam!
Not sure what I did to deserve it, but I thank you!
Short Flash vid...
http://en.tackfilm.se/?id=1273610622233RA56
Canadian pre-orders started today.
64 GB WiFi version ordered, should be here by May 28. No need for the 3G version, I can tether with MyWi on the iPhone.
My dad picked up the similar model on a trip to the US last week. Was playing with it on the weekend, awesome device. Perhaps not magical but still most impressive.
I don't actually have anything to say. Kathleen is due any day, and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of staying home, getting poor sleep, and changing diapers.
But mostly I'm testing to see if journal saving works properly.
We've made some significant updates to the submission/journal system. Visiting Submissions and Journals yields a new form that allows stuff like tags to the data types. There are a number of annoying bugs, but for the most part the dust is starting to settle. More notes will be coming, but this journal entry is really just me putting the final test on the new Journal form.
Dear grub: My name is Lily Liu. I am a PhD student carrying our a project with my supervisor Christian Wagner (iscw@cityu.edu.hk) who is a professor at City University of Hong Kong. We are trying to understand the popularity of Slashdot to its active contributor, such as you. We hope you might be able to help us in our effort by answering three questions.
*Question 1:*
In your opinion, what (if so) makes Slashdot special among online discussion sites? Is it the content, the group of people it draws in, the discussion engine (e.g., content rating and filters), or possibly other factors?
*Question 2: *
Compared with other discussion sites you know or/and have used, do you consider Slashdot's technology platform to be better? In other words, does it encourage (a) more sense of community or (b) more active participation?
(In answering please also feel free to mention the other discussion site or sites you might be comparing to)
*Question 3:*
As a unique user in Slashdot, could you please rate your own reciprocity by assessing what you get from the community compared with what you contribute to it?(you can give an answer such as: i think i get more or i contribute more,of course we would be very appreciative for your explanation of detail)
**
Please let us know at your earliest convenience. We will quickly summarize results and gladly send you a summary, if you are interested (and sufficient replies are received to create a meaningful summary).
Thank You for Your Time and Valuable Feedback!
Sincerely,
Lily
We now abbreviate journals in the firehose... so they are more like slashdot stories with a Read More link to the full text.
The big user facing change this week was structural: historically we had 2 different "skeletons" on Slashdot, but with this refresh we unified to a single one. This change simplifies maintenance for us quite a bit (maintaining the idle section and the firehose views of the same data was a royal pain).
You also will see some changes to the firehose.pl layout. We're playing with the tab layout a bit, moving some menus around and better integrating the core functions into the site chrome. It's a bit buggy atm, so feel free to email me if you see something wonky. We're extinguishing a few minor brush fires but there's no forest fires that we're aware of.
The first real change is that we've changed the meanings of the UI around. The old system is 'Fair' and 'Unfair' and the new system is '+' and '-'. The meanings are subtly different. You are no longer rating individual 'Insightful' or 'Troll' or whatever... you are now stating basically "Is this comment good or bad for you". Personally, since I find very few Score:5 funny comments to be actually really funny (and not just cliche memes) I '-' most of them. You are encouraged to be harsh if you don't actually think something is insightful or funny, call it such. The system encourages more of what you + and less of what you -.
You are also welcome now to do more than 10 m2 per day... however we internally have diminishing returns after 10, so you can do more, but they start to matter less and less.
There will undoubtedly be bugs so feel free to email me or vroom at slashdot if you find them. Probably next week or so we'll move this out to everyone, so your assistance is appreciated.
We also added a thing to 'collapse comments after reading' which I think I might turn of as a default setting soon. This is only usable for subscribers atm as well. But basically, as you navigate through a discussion, it collapses the comments you've read after you move on. This makes it really easy to navigate large discussions without having to scroll over 150 comments you've already read.
we're aware of a number of annoying bugs, but hopefully most of them will be squashed by Pudge for this weeks code refresh. If things are stable, we hope to roll this out for everyone rsn.
also my baby cut his first tooth yesterday. My furniture will never be ungnawed upon again.
Scientists will study your brain to learn more about your distant cousin, Man.