> Gosh. I confess it's pleasing to my ego to see that my absence is noted so quickly here. All last week, I was on vacation at my parents' house in the mountains, which was populated by a rotating crowd of family pretty much the whole time. It was fun and restful, both. I did stop in to check email and the forum now and again but fell behind and didn't have much time to respond and post updates and so forth.
>

Welcome back, and don't ever scare us all like that again! ;-)

> Now that I'm back, I've been plodding through the email and forum posts. I'm all caught up with the forum now, but I still have nearly 100 messages in my email box to reply to. On Tuesday, Computer Stupidities was mentioned in Slash Dot, a web site some of you may be familiar with. Regular visitors have a name for what happens when your site is mentioned there. It's called the "Slash Dot Effect." It means that the hits to your site get so insanely increased that many sites have buckled under. In January, the Slash Dot Effect overloaded the Dialectizer, forcing my web host to shut it down to save their servers. Since Computer Stupidities is not run by CGI programs, we survived this one, but I did receive over 300 computer stupidity anecdote submissions and counting -- that's a large part of what's making the email hard to catch up on. Not that I'm complaining. Tuesday's hits were *triple* the average daily rate, and the effect is only just now subsiding.
>

Along the same lines, the Dialecticizer was mentioned on Ars Technica today, which won't generate the same kind of traffic as /., but will probably have some noticeable effect.

> So within the next day or two, I'll get to updating such things as the Site Journal, IABBBBM, At-A-Glance, and so forth, and I'll try to get another Site Market Game going before too long, too.

Swell. See what you can do about reviewing that latest Star Wars movie, huh?

Iss "use the Force, if that helps" achar