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YES I WAS A VEGEMITE KID: A reminder that I'll be in Brisbane, Australia to do a couple of talks and a book signing at the 12th Annual SAGE-AU Conference between the 16th and the 20th. I'll be leaving Vancouver on the 14th and will likely have spotty email between then and my return. And I'm not kidding about the Vegemite. I love that stuff, and eat it thickly spread on toast.

SUMMER SPONSORS ARE SUPERLATIVE: And another reminder that the UF Summer Sponsorship drive will draw to a close on August 10th. This is the last drive where the Absolut Geek limited edition print will be made available. Please support UF and other independent creators on the Web! The big companies hate it when you do that.

WALLPAPER FOR AUGUST 2004: I'm going to try and do one of these every month, and as such, I'd like to hear what you'd like to see done. Of course, it has to be UF themed. Drop me a line or post your ideas here. Here's the first one, for August 2004, I'm using the art from one of UF's best-selling t-shirts titled "There goes the Neighbourhood." [JPEG, ~600K, 1600x1200]

HAPPY SYSADMINS DAY to System Administrators everywhere! Today is the day you should take your sysadmin out for lunch, or a beer, or heck, even a bag of chips and some stale jerky would be better than nothing. These people work long hours to make sure that your boxes stay up and running, even in the face of bile-inducing spammers and virus writers the world over.

In particular I want to thank Greg "Kickstart" Webster and Jay "Yohimbe" Thorne for doing what needs doing to keep UF on teh IntarWeb -- and they do it with little fanfare or splash; like most sysadmins, they're quietly working behind the scenes, running daemons and casting a baleful, interrogative eye on things that could develop into nastiness (and therefore downtime!) for the UF servers.

So be extra-nice to your sysadmins today. They're the poor folks who have to deal with your porn collection filling up the hard drives at work, after all.