Phexro extended our congratulations to Bruce and Valerie on the birth of Bruce 2.0, otherwise known as Stanley Charles Perens. this is jimmy asked us all to compete in the great Beltsander Races. Need to send crazy Aunt JoAnne some E-mail? Try something from the Great Spam Archive, sent in by Jones. Nezumi-chan wasn't the only one to write in with this one, but all I can say is Oh, yes. ahaning wrote in to tell us about the Obsolete Computer Museum. Want something to plug them into? blizzard shared Electricity from Giant Artichokes. Also, check out the Ultracade, which is cool unless you're a video game purist like me. Dropkick wrote in about a cyber-riffic washing machine. Last but not least, Penguin_99 writes in about cool photos from Galileo. That's it, folks. Thanks to AfterY2K for the title inspiration.

Let's start this off with jsewell's truly amazing story about the rocket car urban legend from the man who claims to have invented it. Did you do your homework last week? Remember that Slashdot was nominated for a Webby in Community so go do their little login dance and vote for us if you think that our First Posts, Oog, Trolls and 'God Slashdot Really Sucks These Days' messages are cool. Maybe we'll even fly CowboyNeal out to give an acceptance speech if we win ;) Glowing Spleen sent us an optical illusion that really bugs me. I had to check if it wasn't an animated GIF. A few for the do it yourselfers: Slash T.M.F.D.W. sent us a real mech and Ryan J. Evans sent in the worlds largest playable tetris. If you don't actually want to build something, but want to play anyway, try SodaPlay and you can mess with these crazy animated 2D springy models. Its surprisingly addictive. After all that building, you might need Jeremy's Microbatch Ice Cream (thanks alangmead) and its "Wired" flavor, a caffinated vanilla ice cream. Between that and the Triple Espresso flavor. Wonder what happens if you keep it in this Bio-Plastic Wrap that detects contaminated food (sent in by Accipiter) You can't use plastic wrap to preserve human heads, but ChunkyGoodness noted that Chet Fleming has US Patent number 4666425 for keeping them alive. Dugh Daren sent us a hilarious essay from Space.com on Star War's most annoying characters that I found extremely funny. brunning pointed us to perhaps the most pressing bug in all of Microsoft's software. kwsNI pointed us to an extremely disturbing article about Pandas on Viagra in China. Blake sent in a filter based on "Being John Malkovitch." Read Slashdot in Malkovitch Mode. And finally, we need a stupid lawsuit: east_bay_pete told us about a commercial that featured a cockroach scampering over the screen ... people are suing because they keep breaking TVs trying to kill the CGI Roach!

Lets start this off with some homework: we were nominated for a 2000 Webby in Community. Please go vote for us (requires annoying login, but please do it anyway! I want a crappy little trophy!) Now with the 'biz outta the way, brainsik pointed us to the Brainshaker: a headmounted subwoofer that looks like it would make Quake a bit to real. Plastik noted a web filter guaranteed to offend the conservative and humorless. But it makes reading Slashdot damn entertaining. And if you're interesting in violating most religions, vkulkarn found an "Escort" who apparently reads Slashdot (will she go out with CowboyNeal?) Speaking of religion, Zippy noted that I am apparently a prophet in the Church of The Enlightenment , along with Jay Stile of Stileproject . Illiad, from Userfriendly.org is a bard. webword sent us CalculusGirls.com which combines 2 of the many things I don't understand. Andy Lester noted that Brunching Shuttlecocks has a book on "Fuzzy Logic Functions", in the style of O'Reilly. yek401 noted that his english professor builds barbie doll cyborgs: god bless tenure ;) Trenchcoat Steve warned us about Moon Land Registry which claims to be selling land on the moon for $10/acre: you even get a deed and mineral rights... and it might be legal! Gravey noted that their are two new Reboot movies going into production. For you conspiracy theorists, backtick noted that everyone's favorite software monopoly might be getting into the furniture biz along with Lazyboy. SgtPepper pointed us to RFC 2795 which "describes a protocol suite which supports an infinite number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters" ucsimon noted that LegoLand in California just gota liquor license. Mind you after a few shots of vodka, finding a 2x2 blue block takes a lot longer. Let's wrap up with jyuter's note that Comedy Central has vid clips of the south park kids doing Python's parrot sketch in Quicktime or Real.

johnathan spectre wrote in to tell us about these really cool plasma shoelaces. plasticPaddy wrote in to tell us about SkyBird, a nifty remote-control ornithopter. Fire up the flux capacitor, because feebeling wrote in about this WWW guide, circa 1993. seizer told us about some crazy guy TCP/IP tunneling through E-mail: now that's dedication. Speaking of crazy people, Green Monkey scared me with his submission, a Web site devoted to Pokémon butts. From the self-referential bucket, the Webby Awards have nominated Slashdot in the 'Community' and 'Print and Zines' categories. Go Vote and we get some trophy or something. _damnit_ wrote in with a nice little piece on the Ides of March. In case you're in the greater Boston area, Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda will be speaking at the Geek Pride Festival at the end of the month.

Moo-ha-ha. CmdrTaco is on vacation (and sending his e-mail to /dev/null, so please don't even try), so I'm doing Quickies this week. On to the good stuff. DigitalDaedalus wrote in to tell us about the SGI 404 pages. Cute. For those with that not-so-fresh feeling, dodobh wrote in to tell us about the Slashdot Purity Test. No, I won't tell you my score. In the 'ear candy' bin, casret told us that they posted the results of the XMMS plugin contest. Time for some stuff from the 'exploding stuff' bin. Aardappel wrote in about Fisheye Quake, and Kintanon caught my eye with Fun With Grapes. Charles Helfenstein told us about the anti-cubicle. Very cool. Fanmail used the force and wrote in about George Lucas In Love. With all the X-Men hype going on, Link wrote in about Mutant Watch. Smurfy cared to share AIEEE, the Acronym Interaction, Expansion and Extrapolation Engine. fwfr told us about the Sim-William Shatner. You'll need Flash. Last but certainly not least, The Welcome Rain wrote in to tell us about your friend and mine, Robot Frank.

After two and a half years we're happy to announce that this is the 10,000th story posted on Slashdot. Uncounted trolls, repeats, server meltdowns, lost nights of code, conferences, quickies, hot grits, flame mails, broken links, 'Score:-1', karma whores, rants, submissions: its been a great ride... along the way we've posted a lot of sweet stories and had some great discussions. We promise to make the next 10,000 suck less! Congrats to Hemos (2153 stories) Roblimo (700) Cliff (693) and Sengan (664). Course I rule all over them with 4478 (I had a 6 month head start tho ;)

Well, last Thursday evening we announced the Beanie award winners at the Slashdot/Andover/VA shindig at The China Club. For those of you not able to attend, I've written a synopsis below, otherwise you can watch the whole deal at TheSync. You can grab the awards in both streaming and downloadable format. And, if you'd like to see some pictures from the show, check out Brian Hawkins' online-pix as well as Kurt Gray's pix from the Andover booth.

A few bits and pieces on the BSD front in the recent past. Scott Bartram announced that JDK 1.1.8 is now available for NetBSD-current/i386. Over at LinuxWorld, Jonathan Bresler sent in this e-mail about BSD related activities. Sun are releasing source code for NFS under the SISSL (and boosting funding for a Linux only effort to implement v4, sigh). Anti Basic wants you to know that you can now pre-order FreeBSD 4.0 from the FreeBSD Mall. And finally, this month's edition of DaemonNews hit the stands a few days ago, including a particularly interesting article by Greg Lehey, outlining his work on software RAID, Vinum.

The nominees are in for Part II of the 'Why The Hell Not' awards. The nominees for 'Best Slashdot Comment Poster' are Anonymous Coward, Tom Christiansen, Bruce Perens, John Carmack and BOredAtWork. The nominees for 'Favorite Slashdot Author' are CmdrTaco, roblimo, Jon Katz and Hemos. The nominees for 'Best Slashdot Story of 1999' are the Hellmouth series, Suckdot and Quickies. In a surprise announcement, the sole nominee for the 'Hemos' award is none other than... Hemos. Go vote for your favorites now!

Nothing like some quality quickies to survive humpday. Magus311X sent us linkage to an awesome web site that has the plans for nearly every set of legos. If you still have your big bucket, you'll love it. I always got bored half way through the plans tho. Started putting guns on my castles and plants on my spaceships wings. HP LoveJet (I like that one) sent us a webpage that will compute your Wu-Tang name ('Rob Malda' = 'Grand Moff Puppeteer') Blaxthos sent us a photo of the most amazing toilet mankind has developed thus far. Looking for some new comics? Bob Barker pointed us to Tug House and Cecil noticed EtherLife v1.5.. I dig EL15. And now the pointless violence and stupidity portion of the quickies: DragonHawk sent us some nice pictures of people ignoring the warning labels on spray cans, and also building a potato gun capable of firing spuds at 550 MPH. Then we have a guy who builds "sparkler bombs" by setting off 1000 sparklers at a time. Jura sent us pictures of computers that he apparently shot the hell out of. Elwood sent us linkage to another license, this one is the BPL or The "Bastard Public License" Next, random Slashdot references from around the net: Raps sent us writes Alfdot, a Slashdot parody weblog about everyone's favorite lame 80s sitcom (cancelled no doubt do to government conspiracy). Slashdot Man earned a special place on my list of 'people to get a restraining order for' his fan page. Eeeek rebrane sent us a Slashdot drinking game. And the perfect quickie to get some closure on the day: McAdder sent us Final Thoughts which is a website that spams your friends and family upon your death to send them your, well, final thoughts from beyond the grave. Wierd.

Let's start this off with some Microsoft parodies: Polo pointed us to a version of office2000 that many Slashdotters might prefer to the Microsoft version. Lexie (ask out CowboyNeal!) sent us a Microsoft Monopoly that you probably won't see in stores. G. Crisp sent us a Lego Penguin: proof that someone has both too much spare time, and too many legos. An anonymous reader noted that you can get AccuWeather®5-Day Forecast for AREA 51. Forecast calls for black helecopters and Gillian Anderson. witten sent us a random Jon Katz story generator called (not surprisingly) Katzdot. While we're on the subject of Slashdot, it's worth nothing that ThinkGeek is now carrying new Slashdot T-Shirts. Of course personally I'd prefer the 'Kernel Panic' shot glasses, but then again, I've had a pretty long week. dayeight sent us something that is pretty indescribible. It involves video games, but presumably it also involved some sort of illegal substances too. I think its a metaphor for something. How about a few 'True Stories' to brighten up your day (no I'm not talking about zany Talking Heads movies). First zentropy sent us what seems to be a true story about why sports and Taco Bell just don't mix. An anonymous reader showed us a woman who is trying to get workers comp from her employer since she got carpal tunnel... her job involves phones, but it wasn't dialing them that caused the *ahem* injury.

We're rolling around the middle of the week for Comdex, and thought maybe people would like to hear some of the news. Linus was awarded person of the year by PC Magazine. Here at the Andover.net booth we've been doing Install Races - 4 PM everyday. The winner for the week gets a Herman Miller Aeron Chair. Rob and I went to the Spencer Katt party on Monday night (Thanks Tim!) and had a good time - but the Post had a funny write-up about it. We had a good time there, unlike the Caldera party that we were locked out of and had to come back later after walking three miles. Grrr - we get that as well as listening to their audience scream "E-Business" to try to get t-shirts. Which is giving everyone migraines in a two hundred mile radius. Starlady has done some general Comdex write-ups, as well as Linux Biz Expo specific stuff. Apparently, Global Media won best Linux product of show for their "streaming product". One of the funniest parts of the show was the kid who mooned Bill Gates - Gates is just out of the picture. Oh, and on another note, CowboyNeal loves his Cyberlegs.

Mat Kovach is trying to organize a LUG Adventure to Ceder Point next september. For those who don't know, its an awesome roller coaster/ride park in the midwest. I wouldn't mind going actually. overcode noted that the patches to Civilization: Call To Power for Linux from Loki Hack now available. Nuke Lawyer causes is a wonder that causes all lawyers to explode as a nuclear bomb. Great stuff. otterboy found an auction that has old printings of Neal Stephenson books with The Big U weighing in at $400. For a book! (Note:I Finally finished Diamond Age. Wow) Mo B. Dick pointed us to a 486 overclocked to 247 mhz combining freezers and booze. El Clip sent us an awesome mrtg parody of a geeks life. escher sent us Microsith which is definitely among the most amusing MS parodies that I've seen. dustpuppy2000 pointed us to Homepage's at Superiosity which is a promising looking new comic strip.

Let's get the serious stuff out of the way: chrisd put up a survey to track what trade shows Linux Coders think are a good idea to go to. With the proliferation of cons, its nice to know what ones matter. Oh, and if you're looking for beer, you should try Heineken's BarTrek. its a PDA proggie with maps to bars and reviews of beer. And if you have GPS, it'll even lead you to it. My guess is after a few beers, it better be a really user friendly app or you might wind up in a desert or something. k-rist sent us linkage to Pulp Simpsons! which I highly recommend. An anonymous reader pointed us to a 15 pound Millenium Falcon made of legos. CK-2 pointed us to what looks like the most impressive real life light saber money can buy. dave pointed us to the site worth it. notjenni, a parody of jennicam. An AC pointed us to a Swedish site has a photo of the Daytrading Yucca plant. This plant is wired up to a computer to trade on the Swedish stock market in response to its electrical activity. If it makes a profit it is rewarded with water and light, if it makes a loss it is unwatered and sits in the dark. The plant has made an 18 percent profit in the last three months! God I hope this is true ;) Effugas pointed us to a pretty good parody of the Matrix. regs pointed us to MonkeyBagel which outta win an award for something. I don't really know what tho. Random merchandising: at0m noted that Copyleft now has Slashdot polos in grey and green. Finally, what would quickies be without some porn? Tolath sent us something graphic... if you happen to be an electrical cord.

Finally home long enough to compile some quickies. option8 sent us the MacCrate which probably isn't up to code. Course neither is this one (thanks pkr) Speaking of cases, Deega sent us a site where you can get air brushed cases. rafa noted that Propaganda Volume 12 is out. UM_Maverick has started YALS called Linuxtopia.com pq wrote in with a picture that proves that a spell checker is probably a good idea. RoLlEr_CoAsTeR found something on Brunching Shuttlecocks which lets you combine Advertising and Perl: its actually extremely clever. Speaking of perl, ThePixel noted Perl Toys, which I think we mentioned a year or so ago, but with Christmas coming up, it probably is worth checking out again. Especially if you want magnetic poetry. Speaking of stuff to buy, JbirdUAH noted that Copyleft has Slashdot frisbees! Just in time for Winter! jhopson sent us a retelling of beowulf starring people you know. Lexie (who should really ask CowboyNeal out) sent us Eunuch which I'm not gonna explain, but its definitely wierd. motardo noted that Dalnet is for sale on eBay. Ant noted that Google seems to have an interesting result if you search for 'More evil than satan himself'. Speaking of evil, jsfetzik sent us Sinux the Linux for sinners. And how about Captain Zion's link to FsckU-FsckMe(tm) which is not for children, but is pretty amusing. Maybe you'll find auto.pron.org a little more wholesome. Finally, jetpack pointed us to Forum2000, which I'd never seen before, but am glad I did. It was mentioned in a comment awhile ago, and then we were assimilated. Super wierd.

There've been a bunch of FreeBSD Con submissions since the Conference started. kken notes that sendmail.net have an early report from the conference. Upside also talk about the conference, concentrating on FreeBSD's position re: Linux (thanks to wozz for that). On the pictures front, we have pics from Bill Fumerola and Gianmarco Giovannelli (here's a much faster mirror for those). Enjoy.

Finnish law was amended last Wednesday, adding a two-year sentence for the catch-all crime "Causing danger to data processing systems." Is keeping sample virus code intended for anti-virus authors on your FTP site a violation?

A Michigan hospital may be only the first of many: a digital dictation system used by doctors for private medical notes has been cracked. 2600 magazine published a sample audio file, which got people's attention. Yahoo and ZDNet's CyberCrime have good coverage.

And, the Defense Department is very proud of its Defense Computer Forensics Lab. They fit broken disks together, read deleted files, "trace hackers across the internet," and use some doohickey called a "Beowulf cluster" to analyze captured computers. Can someone tell me why the FBI gets a lab in this building which was deliberately located near the National Security Agency? Isn't there some conflict of interest?

I've been so busy on the code frenzy that I've been behind on the quickies! Tragic! First lets get the serious quickies out of the way: chris sent us the Atlanta Linux Showcase Tutorial and Conference program for the 3rd Annual ALS, comming up October 12-16, 1999, in Atlanta Georgia. Registration is open. Bl0w0ff noted that The dockapp warehouse has been upgraded and redesigned. k-rist sent us SimShatner. Here is a site selling a video history of Atari with interviews with the guys that did Pac-Man and all that early stuff. Someone sent us a link to another place you don't want to see a BSOD. Want some Blair Witch Parodies? irishmikev sent is a Southpark Parody and stairs sent The Blair Family Circus Project. How about a pair of strange places to put a server? Gareth Walwyn sent us one in a potted plant and GFD noted thatLinux Today has a story about a box that runs in a real Pizza Hut Box. If strange Linux boxes ain't your bag, someone submitted Apple Fritter which contains strange cases for Apples (Legos, Radios, and more) Jade wrote in with how to apply for the position of Sith Apprentice. and rjh pointed us to the iMaul (seems like a lot of stuff is coming in pairs today) Evan Vetere noticed that despair.com has new de-motivators. Matthew McCabe sent us tuxtiles which is taking votes on designs for "Linux Blankets". Since we're mentioning merchandise, I gotta plug Think Geek which is the first place I've seen with good stuff. They mailed us a box of freebies, but I actually woulda bought most of the stuff they sent me (mugs with #include <beer.h> and some sweet perl shirts and other cool stuff). Most of the "Geek" sites just sell crap but most of this was actually clever. We probably should also note that Copyleft finally has the new Slashdot shirts from our contest winners, they look great. ralphb was the first to say that Time Digital has an article on Slashdot.

Quick quickies this evening. First, ^BR wrote in to tell us that the August DaemonNews is out. Jeff Knox noted the Oscar MP3 Player, which looks much less pricey than other stereo type MP3 components. Next, CowboyNeal has completed another round of Slashboxes for you to peruse. The updated list now includes The Listology, HotHardware, linuxdev.net, BeBits, TheBeSite, exoScience, Linux Newbie, Technocrat, MacWEEK, and Halflife.org. If you are having account problems, or have a suggested new Slashbox, contact Neal. Finally, some minor bug fixes: The date links in the Older Stuff boxes were flaking out (time zone bugs). Also, replies on extended discussion pages were being lost. My plan has several more bugs on the TODO list. Please check it before contacting me.

An anonymous reader noted an amusing story where we learn that Jar Jar will make space fun for children with attention spans destoryed by MTV, and senses of humor rendered disfunctional by years of Sitcoms. It might be better if it was hosted by Darth Darth Binks (thanks SissyLaLa) Point_Blank Sent us a really interesting site that has a history of GUIs. Its just interesting to watch the evolution of those clicky interfaces that we've been using for so long. John Hebert noted that there are New Dune Novels coming out. Tim Macinta sent us a super hilarious Microsoft Advocacy HOWTO. Worth the read. $Bob was the first to tell us that the new obfuscated Perl challange is up (no I'm not entering Slash ;) Bowie J. Poag has concocted an epic poem known asTuxowolf: ..A retelling of the classic Beowulf legend in more familliar prose. Gorak sent us a great 3D image gallery at Mastering 3D Graphics that is laden with bit streams that fulfil Rob's Art Axiom (Art is better when it is a desktop image) And finally, the most disturbing bit was sent by an anonymous reader. Ever want to augment your cats the hi tech way. Check it out. Update: 07/29 12:05 by CT : Shaheen reminded me that I'm going to be on The Wednesday Night Wireside net radio thingee tonight at 9:30 EDT.