Looking back at UserFriendly.org

I found myself yesterday perusing the UserFriendly.org website, which is essentially Dilbert aimed at the hardcore geek and IT crowd.

Started up in 1997 by JD 'Illiad' Frazier, it described the daily lives of workers of a small Canadian ISP mixed in with some oddball characters from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, along with the Dust Puppy, who was a collection of dust bunnies and other detritus come to life (with Hobbit-like feet!), and Erwin, a sentient artificial intelligence residing in an old SGI O2 workstation (although at times he also resided in an iMac, a iPod, and an ancient IBM PC).

The strips were published daily online, and IIRC were also published in some tech magazines in the late 1990's and early 2000's.  Unfortunately, due to personal reasons, Illiad has stopped producing new strips since mid 2009, but the strips are still archived online at the site.

The casual observer who is not familiar with the ways of geeks, nerds, and IT workers in general may find the punchlines and the plots confusing, but it still offered a unique point of view of how IT and our Internet culture has evolved in the early days when the Internet and the World Wide Web was new and exciting and seemed limitless.

Also, if you can find it at Amazon, the book 'Ten Years of UserFriendly.org', a huge 1000-page tome of the first 10 years of the strip is worthy to add to your library.

Back to reality?

So it appears that the congress-critters have finally decided to get their collective heads out of their asses and agree on a temporary solution to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling once again.

Polls have advised before the shutdown that the Republicans will take the brunt of the blame for this mess.  IMHO, everyone in Congress is to blame!

Time to do some changes come Election Day 2014... 

Some awesome concept weapons (courtesy SpecOpsBrand.com)

Confessions of a Street Pharmacist: Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

Stumbled across this recipe while looking around the blogosphere.  I definitely gotta try this sometime:

Confessions of a Street Pharmacist: Louisiana Red Beans and Rice

Another month gets off with a bang

So now the government decided to really kick the stupidity level up a notch and decided to shut things down as neither side wants to man up and compromise a little on their respective positions.

At least our military will still get paid, otherwise it might be interesting if time went on and all they got were IOUs.