CmdrTaco's Journal: Sandman, Coffee, Hardware Moves

In the history of Slashdot, there have been a handful of real 'Wow' moments, but I don't think any compares to being mentioned in Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

For starters, Sandman is among *everyone*'s favorite comics. It is critically acclaimed, and justified. For me, it was among the first comics I read that really resonated with me. But I started reading it just a few years ago- it's like finding out about a TV show after it has been cancelled, and watching all the reruns, but sadly knowing that nothing new will come of it.

Of course something new did come of it- Gaiman wrote Endless Nights to celebrate Vertigo's 10th year or something like that. I, like everyone else, desperately anticipated the book, and bought it the day it came out. And there it is, on page 139, in destructions story, a blatant mention on Slashdot.org.

I emailed Gaiman. He actually replied. So I can have my little fan boy moment: I have exchanged emails with Neil Gaiman, and Warren Ellis. Now if only Bendis & Moore would contact me, I'd pretty much have covered the gods of comics.

Running Slashdot is cool, but deep down, I'm just a fanboy ;)

The other highlight for me lately is the new coffee machine at the office. Yes I am that lame. It makes coffee, hot chocolate, tea, and even espresso. All at the touch of a button. Truly technology has come to a great and powerful point where all of these hot beverages can be created using a single machine, and each serving creates an individual piece of trash to throw away. God bless america.

Slashdot is moving very soon to new hardware. The boxes are substantially beefier- while we will be using the same backend, the new webheads should provide us with 33% to 50% more total page throughput potential. With any luck this will translate to faster page loads for all our readers, and more pages served (and therefore ads and therefore $$$) to us. Moving to new hardware is always a challange, and this time is no exception, but everyone involved is doing their parts to get it right. Hopefully for the users, it will be entirely transparent.

This is all the more important because Slashdot continues to grow. We served 3 million pages one day last week. Thats pages. That doesn't count rss, images, palm pages, and all that other crap that supports a website. We're talking 3 million actual pages. We serve approximately a million unique IPs each week now- another number that boggles my mind. Slashdot never ceases to amaze me. We're now like 6 years old, and nobody is more surprised that we've made it this long than me.