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The invincible mapleleaf, captain of Team UFie for the 2001 Sun Run in Vancouver sent in this reminder:

The registration deadline is March 16. Fee is $35cdn. Online registration at www.sunrun.com is working just fine. Sign up now before the deadline looms!

You heard her, marines. Join us for the 10K [run|jog|walk|crawl|wibble] on Sunday April 22nd! Get sweaty! Drink Gatorade! Explore the Big Blue Room!

More details here at http://sunrun.ufies.org/, space courtesy of Arcterex and content courtesy of mapleleaf.

Now, I'm curious...without hopefully suggesting that any of our audience go and permanently mark themselves with UF characters, are there any people reading who have already done this?

Yes, believe it or not, this is actually in the FAQ. I get this pretty much every day in e-mail: "Are you looking for stories and ideas for the strip?"

The answer is yes, absolutely, positively. Some of the best stories come from ideas people have sent me. If you've got an anecdote or an idea for a story that's burning a hole in your head, by all means, send it to stories@userfriendly.org. No guarantees made about using the story, but you never know, and sometimes a story triggers an unrelated idea. Don't be shy, fire away! But please, no more "CD tray is a coffee cup holder" stories! :)

This was seen on /. a couple weeks ago, but because of the esteem with which I hold him in, I'm repointing folks at the Berke Breathed (the man who is a comic strip ghod) interview that Scott Kurtz over at PvPOnline and Chris Jackson of In2it managed to magic up!

The interview is in two parts. Part One is roughly halfway down the page on PvP, and Part Two is about a third of the way down on In2it.

A hearty and envious congrats to Scott and Chris for getting the interview! It's always nice to know where your heroes have quietly gone.

I had this sent to me late last year, but because of some hiccups with my mail and, well, me being a dolt, I lost track of it all.

The photos were taken at the Atlanta Linux Showcase and it'd be an understatement to say that the young fella in these photos [1, 2, 3] was an attraction at the show. His name is Phillip, and he's the One of the Geeks in Training, under the kind and steady hand of his proud parents, Jim and Ginny Mauldin-Kinney.

The story behind this, in Ginny's words: We've been UFies since the cartoon's inception. When discussing how to dress our two-year old, Phillip, for Halloween, it was decided that he should be a "Dust Puppy". He was just the right size, SHORT! Plus, we thought it would be very funny and would test the intellectual capacity of our neighbors! Surprisingly, four out of ten surveyed adults knew EXACTLY what he was!

Being the creative mom, I ran to my local craft store. I bought a black sweatshirt, some fancy black pipe cleaners, white fun foam, a black baseball cap, a black fabric marker and went to work! Four hours and several hot glue blisters later, we had a "Dust Puppy" costume!

And I nearly died from laughter. Thanks to Jim, Ginny and young Phillip! :)

The UF get-together in Seattle on Friday (Mar 2) was, I think, an unmitigated success. A total of 51 people showed up and filled the tables of Chang's Mongolian Grill. Sadly, we didn't get there until 8:30pm or so, so we missed a few people who had already come and gone, but we got to meet the rest of the folks that showed up, including a 4-year old UFie named Nathan. :)

After dinner we retired to Cthulhu's place (he didn't have that squid head I keep hearing about) and just sat around and geeked for a while. It was a good time and it looks like we'll do it again sometime in the near future.

My thanks to the organizers: LdyFaile, Cthulhu, falconr and anyone else I may have neglected to mention. Now I just have to catch up on my sleep.