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HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
00:04 PDT 04 JUL 1999
Happy July 4th to all of the American UFies, wherever you may be! Remember ID4, the movie that starred Will Smith (caution: the site is a bandwidth pig)? I thought it was kind of stinky, but damn does Martina McBride ever sing a good song. Just a plug for about the only saving grace from that film, IMHO of course.

STATIC FACELIFT STILL UNDERWAY
00:03 PDT 04 JUL 1999
Just to make it clear for everyone, the Static isn't quite done yet. There's some fine tuning and modification that still needs doing, so your suggestions and comments are still useful to me. I already have a few more changes planned over the next week thanks to your feedback.

CHOICE WORDS
00:01 PDT 04 JUL 1999
Heh. Guess I should pay closer attention to the words I use sometimes on the Static. Anthony wrote in to say: The wording of the line "Last Week of Cartoons" comes as a bit of a shock on a saturday morning when you've been kept awake till 4:30 the previous night by thunder, lightning and torrential rain. "The Previous Weeks Cartoons" may have been better for my heart! ;-) Sorry old boy, the change has been made. I didn't mean to defibrillate. :-)

ARCHIVED NEWS FIXED
00:05 PDT 03 JUL 1999
With the timely assistance of Silverstr, the busted scripts for the Archived News have been fixed. Nothing was lost, so if you missed a few days, they're all there.

STATIC FACELIFT
00:01 PDT 03 JUL 1999
What you see before you is step one of the facelift that will be taking place on the site over the next few weeks. A little extra functionality has been added above the cartoon strip; the last seven days of cartoons are available as direct clicks so when you get back from your weekend you can come straight to the Static and go back to read Saturday and Sunday without having to navigate the archive calendar (thanks Arcterex). I've moved some things around and generally tidied the page -- the site had grown so flipping fast that it was starting to get 'weedy,' so out came the pruners. :-) Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions; remember, this is just the first step. There're a lot of new and interesting changes to come, primarily to make life easier and more interactive for you. One thing I will promise: no frames (they are Eeeeevell).

FILM ON TUESDAY
00:10 PDT 02 JUL 1999
I have a mittful of news announcements to make, but I suspect most everyone in the U.S. has already left for their Independence Day long weekend. None are particularly urgent so I'll save them for Tuesday, July 6. Included: announcing the winners for three (!) UF contests, two new spiffy UF merchandise items, the second in the series of alternate OS ads featuring the characters from User Friendly, and a few other interesting bits. I wish all of the UFies who are taking advantage of the long weekend a safe holiday; the rest of us will just continue to work our butts off. :-b (Explain to me again why I chose I.T. as a career path?)

TEAM UFIE RC5 STANDING
00:09 PDT 02 JUL 1999
Issarad (where do people get these cool names?) sent in news that Team UFie has climbed up the distrubuted.net chart again: Just passing on word that we of Team UFie have moved up to the #48 position in the RC-5-64 charts.

STEPPED IN IT DEEP
00:06 PDT 02 JUL 1999
It looks like the Yahoo/Geocities TOS stunt has earned the company some severe backlash. Sites like Boycott Yahoo are taking the "We can do what we like with your stuff" statement in the Terms of Service to the street and raising a huge furor. Yesterday I said Yahoo burned a few bridges; I now see that Yahoo burned those bridges while people were on them, and most of them survived and boy are they pissed. As someone whose livelihood revolves around his intellectual property, I can see why everyone is so narked. My prediction: Yahoo will survive the firestorm, but will find itself partially gutted.

AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT PASSES INTERNET BILL INTO LAW
00:01 PDT 02 JUL 1999
A bunch of people sent in a memo that was written by Patrick Bindon, the policy advisor for Stephen Smith, an Australian Member of Parliament and the Shadow Minister for Communications: I regret to inform the list that approximately 15 minutes ago the Government gagged debate on the passage of the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999, which was then voted on for the Third reading. The Bill has now passed through the Parliament, and will await consent from the Governor-general (purely symbolic). Labor and the independent member for Calare, Mr. Andren, voted against the Bill. This is a tragedy, not only for the Internet, Internet users, and the Internet industry, but for open debate on important issues in this country. A sad day indeed. They could still repeal it, much like the CDA was flattened in the U.S. There's an item on the newswire that covers the bill passing into law.

QUICK REVIEW: WILD WILD WEST
00:57 PDT 01 JUL 1999
No spoilers. The pacing in the movie was all wrong. Needed more gunplay, less bad puns. Kevin Kline was "okay," a big surprise. The bigger surprise was Will Smith's lacklustre performance; he just seemed pissed off throughout the movie. Kenneth Branagh as the villain was excellent, but the character was shallow. Salma Hyack was nice eye-candy, as was Bai Ling. Some funny moments, especially the "drumming" comment. Nice effects, nothing spectacular -- am I getting jaded? The story was flat. The film editor botched up the death of one of the bad guys (he died for no apparent reason). The music sucked, except for the Will Smith rap in the end credits. Overall, the movie sucked; I think that the screenwriters and director should've looked at the most excellent paper role-playing game Deadlands before they started shooting the film.

YAHOO BURNED A FEW BRIDGES
00:05 PDT 01 JUL 1999
The recent furor regarding the mess that Yahoo/Geocities brought about with their all-encompassing claims to the intellectual property on the web sites they hosted has compelled Yahoo to rewrite their Terms of Service (see Paragraph 8). Bitstream wrote in with the following comment: The new TOS is certainly meant to calm the fears of what few members they have left, and indeed it is a much safer wording in terms of copyrights. Like several others, they now claim those previously outrageous rights for advertising usage. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I'll reopen my site there. My opinion of them has likely been permanently tarnished. On the same topic but in a brighter light is the existence of crosswinds.net, a service offering free e-mail and web hosting, with the following philosophy: Our e-mail and personal web pages will always be free and unlimited. We will never force you to place banners or pop ups on personal pages. We will never give away, sell, or trade your e-mail address or personal information. Crosswinds lays no claim to your site's content or copyrights, including those members we choose for the Site of the Week! Ye flipping gods. What a breath of fresh air. You listening, Yahoo?

WEIRD AL YANAKIN
00:02 PDT 01 JUL 1999
This should probably be a LOTD, but it's too good to hold on to. http://www.sagabegins.com is the home of Weird Al Yankovic's latest and greatest, a song spoofing the Phantom Menace, in Quicktime, AVI and streaming video. Enjoy! Thanks to Daniel Delgado for sending this in.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CANADA! 132 YEARS OLD
00:01 PDT 01 JUL 1999
Yep, the home of your friendly cartoonist is one hunnerd and thirty-two years old. If you're interested in finding out more about Canada's history and culture, check out this link.

TEAM UFIES RC5 #50 OVERALL
00:07 PDT 30 JUN 1999
Congrats to all of the UFies participating in the RC5 contest. Chris Nye (any relation to the Science Guy?) and fractal wrote in to let us all know that we've climbed to #50 overall. We're in the top 50 now!! The other teams had better watch their butts. :)

MIRANDA THE SPOKESMODEL
00:05 PDT 30 JUN 1999
Thank you to everyone (there were quite a few!) who sent in their guffaws and praise regarding the Linux advertisment I did in the wee hours of the morning. And yes, I spelled "prerogative" wrong, so it's corrected now (thanks to Godmoma for sending in a corrected version -- she gets bonus points for recognizing the typeface I used!). I told you I was running on little sleep. :-) I did promise to do a series of them, so that's what'll happen. I may do one or two more over the long weekend so you have something to look forward to when you get back from the weekend.

BANNER-BUTTON CONTEST OVER
00:01 PDT 30 JUN 1999
The Banner & Button contest is officially over! My thanks to everyone who entered. I'll be selecting a winner over the long weekend and announcing who won probably on Tuesday -- seeing that July 1 is Canada Day and July 4 is Independence Day in the U.S. I figured I'd leave it until people got back from wherever they're going for their breaks.

LINUX ADVERTISING?
02:37 PDT 29 JUN 1999
Okay, this proves I shouldn't stay up late, especially when I'm running on roughly 4 hours of sleep a night for the past week. I did up an advertisment that seems amusing at this hour...no telling how I'll feel about it when I wake up to it in the light of day. Expect three or four more in same vein over the next few weeks. And just to head off the inevitable questions: Yes, you may post this on your own personal web site if you link it back to http://www.userfriendly.org/; yes, you can print it out and give it to your friends; anything else and you'd better write me. Anyway, enjoy!

CRUSH CRUSH CRUSHING MY HEAD
00:10 PDT 29 JUN 1999
Just a brief note to let everyone know that I am way behind on my mail. If you wrote me with a question and I haven't replied, please remain patient. I'll get to your letter shortly.

YAHOO WANTS IT ALL?
00:07 PDT 29 JUN 1999
Bitstream pointed out a bit of nastiness. Head on over to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ and read item number eight (8). The implications of this are rather scary. As a long-time user of Geocities, and I'm talking pre pop-up days, I've put up with a lot of changes, many of them quite annoying. This one, though, is unforgivable. I have no intention of granting anyone such wide-ranging usage of my intellectual property. If anyone wants to contact them regarding this, they can be reached at: copyright@yahoo-inc.com If I'm reading the terms correctly, any cartoonist (for example) who has their site on Geocities or any Yahoo property has just given up a whole whack of IP rights to Yahoo. If I ran UF there, Yahoo could use the Dust Puppy image in their advertising without paying me a cent. NOT nice. I wonder how many people actually take the time to read the terms of use? Now having said that, I doubt Yahoo would do anything quite as stupid as swipe someone's intellectual property, but as my lawyer is fond of saying, "trust no one." Or was that Chris Carter?

GUESS I'D BETTER REGISTER USERFIENDLY.ORG
00:03 PDT 29 JUN 1999
Dogthief wrote in with this rather interesting bit: The reason you always register possible misspellings of your domain name!! follow this link: http://www.microsfot.com/ Poetic isn't it? Indeed. You don't suppose someone at one of the Evil Companies would take userfiendly.org and kick in a redirect which sends you to AOL...? Nawww...

UFIES MATE BETTER
00:01 PDT 29 JUN 1999
...or so I'm told. ;) The User Friendly Chess Tourney is now running, thanks to the selfless efforts of Gruuk and Iambe. The tournament is for all skill levels, so don't be shy. There's even a prize for the winner of each skill category! Head on over to http://chess.ufies.org/index.html and check it out.

LINUX WORLD EXPO IN AUGUST
00:10 PDT 28 JUN 1999
Well, it's official. User Friendly will have a booth in the .org pavilion at LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in August. My thanks to the LinuxWorld gang, to Jeff Bates (aka Hemos of Slashdot) for suggesting us, and to VA Linux Systems for sponsoring the .org pavilion. More details will be posted as I get them; we should have bags of neat things to bring with us to the show (and I'll bet Hemos suggested UF for the pavilion 'cause now he knows I have to give him a Dust Puppy hat. And he beat Rob to it. :-) )

REALLY, IT WAS A COINCIDENCE
00:05 PDT 28 JUN 1999
Something spotted by Marc Beckersjuergen: ...have you already been pointed to the fact that one of the taglines of "The Matrix" as featured in your strip of April 18, 1999 is "The future will not be user friendly" Coincidence? I don't think so ;-) Okay, now I feel all sneaky and conspiratorial.

A DUST PUPPY PAINTED ON THE CAPSULE WOULD BE COOL...
00:03 PDT 28 JUN 1999
Harry Sark wrote in with this really quite interesting request: I was at a sci-fi convention this weekend in Burbank, CA to listen to my brother-in-law give a talk about NASA/JPL direction for the future. While there I noticed a fellow Ufie walking around. He was wearing a dust puppy T-shirt. Wish I coulda chatted with him as I am having a difficult time installing SuSE Linux 6.1. Anyhoo during the speech my brother-in-law asked the audience what they would like to see happen in space, missions wise. Connecting the two events I thought; 'what if we could pose this question to the Ufie community? Any thoughts? I would be glad to carry any results to him and the folks who run the agency's community outreach etc. I could not however handle that volume of mail on my little box here. Our (Canada & US) space agencies are well connected enough, I think the idea has merit and is at least interesting. A grand idea. As per Harry's request, please do not send him mail. Rather, send your ideas to feedback@userfriendly.org and I'll collate all of the information and send it off to him once we're done. I'll keep that e-mail addie open until the end of this month, so you have until Wednesday to come up with some really bright ideas that could affect our push into space. Not asking much. :-)

BRITISH GOVERNMENT CHAMPIONS NOSINESS
00:01 PDT 28 JUN 1999
Sent in by Jonathan Nichols: The British government has become the first in Europe to openly propose internationally agreed requirements for ISPs to build technology into networks that would allow for police surveillance. More details here. Good grief. More burden on the ISPs? That has potential to shut down the smaller ISPs and force consolidation under the giants -- which is probably inevitable, but it still tastes sour. Gah. Obligatory Surveillance Trigger Keywords: Munitions. Anarchist. Capybara.