You know you're in for a training from hell when the instructor says that he's going to whack you with the stick of pain if your tempo (when doing drills) is too slow...

It was a good training though :-)

I've written about Nebbeline on Multiply. Thought I'd share her with everyone over here...

And don't forget to visit Wolfgangkloof ;-)

In the last few weeks, we've switched most users over to the new 'D2' discussion system- a fully ajaxified discussion system. There are a number of minor bugs, but I figured I'd toss up a few quick notes to address the biggest user complaints.

1. you can turn it off if you log in. Some people get stuck in there ways, and no matter what we build it will never make you happy. So you can have the old lame system and we'll all enjoy the new cool system without you.
2. you can get 'nested' mode back by dragging the 2 thresholds together in the floating slider. they connect and become a single thing. it's quite nifty, and if you are logged in the setting is remembered so you don't have to click to navigate deep threads.
3. you can get more comments at once from the 'prefs' link. the default is currently 50, but choosing 'many' changes that (currently) to 250, which means you will get roughly the average number of comments in a typical slashdot story. Yes you will need to click 'more' on a huge discussion, but at that point we're talking about very large pages and slower computers like to choke on huge pages anyway so we have to balance size and performance.

there are 2 huge wins here for everyone... the first is retention of context. You can wade into a thread, retrieve more comments, change your threshold, all without losing your place like you did in the old system. And using the WASD keys to navigate makes it very easy to peruse discussions in a number of interesting ways. mouseover the help text in the floater for more information about how they work. We're open to suggestions on how this should work- i'm not totally happy with it yet... but it *is* possible to mash a single key and go from start to end of a discussion, which pleases me.

the second is that the default users see the highest score comments first. You can change this by logging in and toggling the retrievable order to oldest first, but for most people this means that the first comments they see will be the best. There are so many great comments on Slashdot, but most users don't see them because they are buried within the discussion. I think this goes a long ways towards helping.

A final word about the ads in there- unfortunately there are ads in the new system. Changing from a static page-page-page system to a dynamic ajax system with a single 'page load' causes us to serve hundreds of thousands of fewer ads. We worked out roughly how long people read discussions and are trying to strike a balance so that you see roughly the same number of ads under this system as you would have under the old one. We'll tweak it of course, but we gotta pay the bills here people!

And obviously all of this is a work in progress. Pudge is leading development work on this. The next project is to make it possible to post without losing your place in the discussion, and then to refine navigation keybindings and thread expansion/contraction controls to make the whole UI clean. We appreciate constructive criticisim. There are bugs (especially in IE, but almost no slashdot user runs IE) but we're mashing them out- thanks for your feedback on them. As we sand off the rough edges I think you'll all find the new system a vast improvement if you just play with it for a bit and give it a fair chance. Not all change is bad ;)

Wolfgangkloof - http://wolfgangkloof.myminicity.com/ :-)

read it and laugh at the stupidity

At least he admitted he was a dumbass...

Read about it here

lots of photos to whet your appetite and make your RoFs go stir-crazy ;-)

I got a lensbaby! :-D

The 2.0 to be more precise. I can't wait to start playing around with it...

If you don't know what a lensbaby is or what it can do, click on the product link, or perhaps check out the lensbaby flickr group...

I also got penguin jewelry - the silver one. Apparently, it was the (plush) penguin and owl families that insisted I get this ;-)

Boyfriend of tuxette got one of these, so that he can find himself :-P

More crashes in the full moon

Statistics show that a full moon really can "bring out the beast," at least in Norway, where the most collisions between cars and moose occur when the moon is full and the weather is cold.

Norway's state statistics bureau SSB reports that 1,321 moose were killed in traffic accidents during the past year. Most of them occurred in the winter: Statistics reveal three times as many collisions between moose and vehicles in January than in the summer.

Torstein Storaas of Hedmark College, one of Norway's foremost experts on moose, told newspaper Aftenposten that it's not just because it's easier for the moose to move alongside open roads when snow is lying deep in the forest.

It's also, Storaas said, because the moose prefer to eat the twigs and branches of pine and low shrubbery during the winter. "Therefore they need to emerge from the deep fir- and spruce forest," he said. "Unfortunately many claim they also are attracted by the salt spread on highways by road crews."

The moose is also most active during a full moon, although it's not entirely clear why. Moose tend to wander more than usual during a full moon, and not just because the moonlight guides their way. Studies show they're just as active when cloud cover blocks out the moon.

Motorists are thus advised to use extra caution during full moon periods in the wintertime. Subfreezing temperatures, snow in the forest and dry air draw the moose towards roadways, and that's when driving is dangerous.

Many drivers involved in collisions with moose claim the animal suddenly darted across the road, and they didn't have a chance to brake in time. Storaas said that's because the moose are easily stressed by the noise of traffic and headlights, making them unpredictable. They also have trouble moving on hard, icy roads and want to get across as quickly as possible.

Collisions between cars and moose are generally more serious than collisions with other animals, because the moose are so large. They're generally hit in the legs, and then land with full force in the car's passenger compartment.

I didn't finish using the last set I got. And I've only been here a very few times since I wrote my last JE. What gives? ;-)

Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

SPRRRRRRRRRRRRINGBOKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ENG 6 15 RSA

Whoa... very close match. Scoring only by kicks. Both sides came soooo close to the line but never made it... wow... !!

What was up with the trophy falling apart during the awards ceremony? Hmmm...

I posted this on multiply; forgot to post it here. Freshly Ground is a South African group...

watch and listen - it's one of the most beautiful music videos I have ever seen...

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

...but not the long flight home. Urgh :-/

See Multiply and all... photos etc. to come later...