I'd have to say it was a good day.

I guess I finally hit Excellent Karma yesterday, but I didn't notice it till this morning. I'm really a little too excited about this. And it's pretty irrational, really. Anybody who posts semi-intelligently enough times without posting too many idiocies will get there sooner or later. It took me a lot longer than most probably, because --other than a few initial inane posts-- I only post when I feel there's something useful to be said. I've been posting since June, but there's been less than 40 times I've felt the need to post anything.
This brings up an interesting question: I usually surf at +2, and most likely a good percentage of other people do, too. So my messages are now available by default to a lot more people than before. Now, is it really fair for me to just post at a higher level because I think that what I have to say is useful? Should I just allow Mob Rule, ie the moderators, to decide whether what I write is worth elevation? I guess that's what the "No bonus" option is for. That's handy. I didn't realize that was a feature. On the other hand, it often seems that many moderators surf at +2, as well...
Not really OAN, but we'll say it is, anyway. In an effort to be able to surf at +3 and glean everything pertinent from /., I've been experimenting with elevating points for different things. Insightful, interesting or informative posts all get a +1, and my friends all get a +2. The moderation of mod categories doesn't work terribly reliably, since a post may get +2 interesting, then -1 overrated, and it falls under my radar. My friends list isn't very long yet, since I just started this plan. I pick friends by checking previous posts and journals of users who posted something really good. If I like what I read in their profile, I add them. It's a slow process, but hopefully it will yield good results.

Somebody posted a comment in a discussion about MS' plan to create a new command shell that really got to me.

Leave it to Windows "sysadmins" to get their MCSEs and then not bother to look at the single most important aspect of Windows 2k: Scriptability. Windows 2000 is almost 100% scriptable, the IIS metabase is 100% scriptable. The Active Directory is 100% scriptable.
No, VBScript isn't quite as easy as creating a batch script in bash, since it is object oriented and requires creating the objects before manipulating them, but it's really incredibly simple if you've even taken some fairly basic programming.
I work with these products every day. I write scripts for dumbass sysadmins on a regular basis. One of them came to me and asked me to stop writing scripts. He's worried that if they keep automating processes, they won't need him around anymore. Well, we've got 350 servers and 15 admins. He may be right.

So I've had this plan brewing for a while.

I intend to write a bot to post to slashdot. This bot will use regular expression filtering to look at the post and try to ascertain what it means. Possibly it will use the categories to decide how to respond. It will also process the article linked in the post. I'll try to make sure it gets the correct link by telling it to ignore sendto:'s and links to just the home directory of a site, unless that's the only link provided for that site.

Now, the bot will not actually post any original messages. It will only respond to messages rated +2 or better or messages asking something like "But how fast is it?" or "Does anybody have a picture of this guy?" which will be processed from the article and posted with a "RTFA" appended to the message line, or search google for the specific question, process the resulting page and post a "I found this here" message. It will also keep a cached copy of the page to post in text format should the page get slashdotted.

The real problem will be to make it "self-learning". Maybe it will look at short, highly moderated responses to other posts, and restate those posts in some way when a similar question is asked, but I'm not sure how I'll pull that off. It would be tricky to categorize it correctly.

Now, it will require some doing, and I'll have to make sure it only posts once every 10 minutes or so, or once every few minutes, but only at certain times of the day, to look as much like a real poster as possible. Who knows, it might even improve the signal-to-noise ratio I'm always bitching about. I'll be curious to see how quickly it either gets to Totally Excellent Karma, or gets modded down to oblivion.

Hangovers.

Just further proof that delayed negative reinforcement doesn't work.

Including moderation...
I've been a moderator a few times now. I'm a moderator again today. Sadly, I often have trouble using my entire meager allowance of 5 mod points. Why? well, since you ask:

1. I don't like to mod up a post that's already at +4. Unless it really blows me away, I hesitate to mod up a post that's even +3. I just feel that there should be a more even distribution of points between posts.

2. I refuse to moderate anything funny, as my sig attests. Slashdot is about technology and nerdy news, not comedy. That, and I don't find the run-of-the-mill "imagine a beowulf cluster of these" and "step 3: Profit" jokes humorous. If you want played out jokes reused again and again, take it to FARK or SomethingAwful.

3. I generally ignore ACs, unless the comment is particularly meritable. At the +0 level I have to skim a lot, and some posts which might otherwise receive a point instead get glossed over because the poster is an AC.

4. That brings me to my last point, touched upon in reason #3. There's just too much crap getting posted. In one article, I saw 4 "1st Post!" messages, and probably thirty other stupid posts out of a total of maybe 40 messages. That figure is generally about accurate: About 1 in 10 posts has anything interesting to say.

This time, I've gotten close. I only have two mod points left, and I'm hoping to actually use them.

I was brushing my teeth this morning and thought of something funny.

Found: Schroedinger's cat. Half dead...
Yeah, that sounded a lot funnier when it was still in my head....

Microsoft-based sysadmins are the single most under-knowledgeable, over-egoed bunch of wankers in the known world. Outside of Union pipe-fitters. Actually, any union worker who makes $60k a year to smoke weed and do a job that a kid in Junior High could do (which actually describes quite a few admins pretty well too, except for the Union part...) generally falls into that group.
The way I see it, sysadmins either don't go to college, or they get some useless degree like Botany or Management Information Systems ("Let's learn how to do a cost-benefit analysis" As if they'd ever make management!). Rather than get a useful degree like CS or EE so they could be designing networks or, better yet, the new network protocols, they merely shop around for a 14-day MCSE course and get a job as a certified sysadmin for $50,000 a year. Yay.
What's really dangerous is when some of these sysadmins decide that they're smarter than they are, get together with "Learn to program C++ in 21 days" and a few RFCs, and create their own new security protocol. I'm convinced that this is how WEP came into being.