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.

Good fun at the range

Early yesterday morning, I woke up and decided it was way past time to go do some shooting.  Even though there was a wind advisory and the gusts were fairly strong, I figured it would make things interesting.  Besides, I wanted to make sure my carbine was properly zeroed and make sure everything was running properly.
So I loaded up with my pistol (Glock 22), my carbine (an AR-15 with 16" barrel and Magpul furniture), one rifle magazine (short on the ammo, I know what I said about having enough ammo but financial considerations come into play), all my pistol mags, the ammo can full of 40S&W, and range bag, then headed out to the county's shooting park.
Although it's way the hell and gone halfway into the Sheep Range at the end of Decatur Blvd. (or so it seems), the range is a very decent facility, with separate areas for trap/skeet shooting, archery, and rifle/pistol.  Hopefully they will follow through on their plans to add a tactical range in the near future ;-)
I wound up being the first person out on the range, and had plenty of time to get things situated with setting up my targets with the kind assistance of one of the RSOs.  About half an hour later, another gentleman showed up, and I just had to stop and watch the fun as he was shooting an AR pistol (for you non-gun types, it's basically an AR-15 with a very short barrel) and had his target at 10 yards out.
Very loud muzzle blast, which can be expected with a shorter barrel, but I am sure it was fun to shoot all the same.
After setting up my larger targets, I used the magazine full to make some very nice shots and with only using my support hand to hold the barrel and not the usual rifle rest on the table.  I didn't have to make any physical sight adjustments and though the wind probably didn't help matters, I still wound up with a fairly decent grouping of hits.

 So overall, not a bad morning to start things out with.  Now just need to get some more rifle ammo and keep practicing to get some tighter groupings.

How a LEO should act towards citizens

While I do not totally agree with open-carry (has its advantages and disadvantages), it's nice to know there's at least one good LEO out there who is aware of citizen's constitutional rights and doesn't go full-retard.