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NOT BAD FOR A CARTOON CHARACTER
22:42 PST 20 DEC 1998
The vitriol sure flew on the TIME site when Dust Puppy started catching up to Mick Foley. Check out the Friendly Forum and look under General Discussions/Time's Man of the Year Poll. April has been kind enough to sift through the crap and post mentions of the Dust Puppy on the Pathfinder web forum. On a related site, Dust Puppy is in a healthy third place in PEOPLE's 25 Most Intriguing People online poll. As of this writing, the scores are: 1. 'Stone Cold' Steve Austin, 1308 votes; 2. Mick Foley, 1077 votes; 3. Dust Puppy, 834 votes.

#2 ON THE WORLDCHARTS
22:38 PST 20 DEC 1998
Spiffy. We climbed to #2 on the World Charts from #3 last week. I also notice that User Friendly pal Segfault is on the chart and climbing fast. Slashdot is there as well, but they've been on the charts forever. :)

IT'S NECK AND NECK
22:29 PST 18 DEC 1998
Looks like it's a close thing between Steve Austin (#1 at 105 votes), Mick Foley (#2 at 100 votes) and the Dust Puppy (#3 at 95 votes) at the time of this writing. I just realized the irony of the title of this news entry, given that the top 3 entries in the poll don't seem to have necks. ;-)

YE GODS, ANOTHER TARGET
18:11 PST 18 DEC 1998
Get this: PEOPLE magazine just launched a poll for the 25 Most Intriguing People on their site. Their polling software seems a little more sophisticated so autovoting won't work. However, individuals voting for the Dust Puppy wouldn't hurt. Contribute if you like, or not if you're tired from the bashing about done to TIME poll. Either way, we made it to #2 and seriously threatened the #1 position inside of two and half days. Mick Foley woulda been outta there, so way to go people!

YOU WENT, YOU SAW, YOU CONQUERED
09:50 PST 18 DEC 1998
OK folks, looks like the point was made. I got a really nice letter from Pathfinder's Director of Editorial Technology asking politely that the UFies stop hammering the site. Apparently they do sift through the logs and remove suspected bot-votes, so the little guy is sitting at #4 again. But heck, it was fun to be up in the top three for a while. :) The TIME guys are cool -- Larne Pekowsky, the chap who wrote me, didn't seem at all mad, and he even fessed up to reading the strip. Let's be good to them now, after all, as Larne put it, we do have fellow geeks behind that server who'd like to go home at a reasonable hour.

DUST PUPPY #2
01:08 PST 18 DEC 1998
Thanks to the concerted efforts of the UFie community (including folks from #quakenet, #photoshop and #parasite), Dust Puppy made it to the #2 spot around 6:30 EST. We're at around 95,000 votes at the time of this writing, which means Dust Puppy is close to halfway to the #1 spot, and we have about 2 days to do it. Judging from the vitriol being flung about by the wrasslin' fans, it would really upset them if Dust Puppy knocked Mick Foley from the top spot. :-) Here's another couple of TIME covers done up by Greg Fodor and Barry Drake. Thanks, guys.

NEWS FROM THE FRONT
15:32 PST 17 DEC 1998
Here's an item that came through news@ from the gang at Inreach Internet: We, the employees of Inreach Internet Tech Support, have been running multiple instances of the autovoter most of the day, and if the site will continue accepting votes (doubtful at this point) we will let them run all night. By our calculations, we should be able to put Dust Puppy in first place by the end of the voting period. Everyone keep those voters going, they seem to work even though thay have taken the site down... go figure.

Another item, this one from Carson Christian: (6:11 PM EST) The TIMES voting server has gone down again... they MUST be running NT. Dust Puppy was last seen still at #3.

YOU'RE OUTTA THERE, STEVE
13:34 PST 17 DEC 1998
As of the time of this writing, Dust Puppy has placed #3 in TIME's Man of the Year poll and knocked Steve Jobs down to the #4 position. WOW! I understand that the poll closes by the 20th, so we have about 60 hours to bring Dust Puppy to the #2 position. If we don't reach #2, it doesn't matter -- getting to the top 3 is pretty stoking. :-) Way to go, UFies!

TIME SERVER BACK UP
09:44 PST 17 DEC 1998
TIME's polling server is back on-line, and Dust Puppy is still in fourth place! We're about 13,000 votes short of passing Steve Jobs at #3, and there's still time! Here's the link. And here's a hilarious TIME cover with the Dust Puppy by Mara Kaminowitz. Who knows...it may one day come to pass. ;-) Finally, an intrepid UFie did a Naughty Thing and whipped up a Dust Puppy Auto Voter. You guys are bloody mad. I'm filled with pride. :-)

TIME SERVER BROUGHT TO ITS KNEES
22:01 PST 16 DEC 1998
By 4:15PM (PST), Dust Puppy made it all the way to the #4 position on the TIME poll, passing Jesus Christ, Madonna, and the Clintons. We were about halfway to overtaking Steve Jobs at the #3 spot, when the poll was taken offline 'for server maintenance' according to the TIME webpage. It's quite possible that the UFies beat the snot out of their server and it shrieked in agony. What are they running, NT? A thousand thank-yous to everyone who participated! I nearly peed myself when I woke up this morning and saw Dust Puppy at the number 9 spot. :) I'm told that when the poll goes back up, a bunch of UFies are going to try and peg the #1 spot for the little guy. If he knew what you guys were doing, he'd be blushing furiously. :-) And didn't someone say 'Dust Puppy for President!' in the Friendly Forum?

DUST PUPPY FOR TIME'S MAN OF THE YEAR?
01:11 PST 16 DEC 1998
I did a doubletake when I saw this in the Friendly Forum:

By Espaliered Tomatoes on Tuesday, December 15, 1998 - 10:48 pm:
I humbly suggest that a determined effort by UFies could overcome such front runners as Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf in Time's MOTY poll at http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/moy/index.html It allows you to vote multiple times because it isn't very sophisticated. The top 20 are displayed. The last few have about 1500 votes each and aren't rising much at all. I propose: Dust Puppy

Now that would be funny; here's a chance for UFies to scare the hell out of traditional media. So, if you care to, hit the TIME site and type in 'Dust Puppy' as your choice. Let's see what the UF community can do. :)

WELCOME ABOARD!
00:36 PST 16 DEC 1998
Running this site is starting to take time away from cartooning, so I did the best thing I could: I put some very qualified volunteers into 'staff' positions. These generous folks make no money for the burdens they shoulder, so my heartfelt thanks go to them. They are, in no particular order, Arcterex, the site Godling; Tricia, the Geekstuff Reviews editor; Ritalin-Boy, the site Webhacker; and Common Bear, the Forum Meister, who you all probably know already. More spots will be filled over the next little while, so if you've written in to volunteer, you should be hearing from me fairly soon. Bear with me though; I have over sixty applications sitting in my mailbox that needs attention, and not that many spots to fill as yet. It'll take time to organize all of this.

RHYMES WITH DISCO
00:26 PST 15 DEC 1998
I've received mail from a few stalwart fans who work for Cisco in the past few months. If that happens to be you, please mail me. I have a question that only a Cisco employee could answer.

WHAT A CHRISTMAS!!
00:22 PST 15 DEC 1998
WOOHOO!! I just got a beautiful calendar of New Zealand (a place I've always wanted to visit, and that's where the calendar travelled to the West Coast from!) via snail mail today from the generous and thoughtful Laren. Thanks luv! I should also mention that I got a really cool Dust Puppy model from Jim Chamberlain in Denmark. Thanks Jim! Both items will sit in a place of honour in my workspace in the new year. Stuff like this is a major plus for struggling miserable cartoonists like me. :-)