Racoon in the News

So my roommate, the Racoon Fink (aka "Ranger Rick" and less often "Ben Reed"), has been in the geek news a lot lately. He's had two (count 'em, not one, but TWO) Slashdot-ings lately, and now he's on eWeek's website. Very nice!

Ben's a big Mac geek, and he's in the very small inner circle of leaders inside a rather large group of geeks moving free software from Unix to Macintosh. Just recently he ported the KDE office application, KOffice, a free competitor to Microsoft Office, to the Macintosh. That's what's getting him all the attention. People are going nuts over it! ;-)

And for those less tech-savvy geeks amongst my readers, a Slashdot-ing is when an article is posted on Slashdot.org, the preeminent geek news site. Often a rather small site is posted to Slashdot, causing Slashdot's thousands upon thousands (maybe millions?) of readers to read the small site, often overwhelming the server or its allotted bandwidth in a short time. This is called the "Slashdot Effect" or just "getting Slashdot-ed". Ben's server held up through two good Slashdot-ings, so he's pretty happy.

I'm happy for him! He's done a lot of work, and he's now getting his fifteen minutes! You go Ben!

Now he can check off another of his life goals todo list:
* Get an IMDB entry (for a song he wrote that was included on the extended DVD of the movie A Better Place)
* Get Slashdot-ed (not just once but twice!)
* Get an "I Am Sci-Fi" commercial like Moby (it could happen)
* Get a girl who finds all this stuff sexy (one of these days, my friend, I'm sure you will!)