10 years of UserFriendly.org

I haven’t blogged for a while.

This is partly because my daughter and I have been enjoying some major events in Toronto (Ontario Science Centre, ROM, shopping, more shopping, etc.), and not much has happened in the Geek world aside from the new Apple hardware updates and Firefox achieving 100% market share in Antarctica.

However, the main reason I haven’t blogged is that I have been engrossed with reading the 10th Anniversary book from UserFriendly.org (over 1000 pages).

Of all of the online comics, UserFriendly.org is the geekiest. Unlike Dilbert (which I also love), UserFriendly.org has an incredibly strong IT-only theme that narrows its audience to hardcore IT geeks. Dilbert has the occasional IT-only cartoon, but largely mocks corporate politics, which most people can relate to.

What makes the UserFriendly.org 10th Anniversary book awesome, is that is contains every cartoon ever made in chronological order. This is very important because UserFriendly.org often identifies the events that are of extreme importance to geeks at the time, such as the Microsoft Anti-trust trial, the SCO lawsuit, the RIAA press releases, the death of Douglas Adams, etc. As a result, by spending the last few weeks reading the comics and commentary again, I “relived” the last decade and remembered the key issues that influenced my personal values and outlook on life.

Another thing that I love about UserFriendly.org is that it is extremely UNIX/Linux-centric. You will find frequent references to stuff that only UNIX/Linux geeks would understand such as cron jobs and emacs. UserFriendly.org also assumes that to be an educated/good/credible/ethical geek, you must know UNIX/Linux (Windows is for morons and half-ass geeks). What can I say…….I agree completely :-)

Finally, the last thing that I love about UserFriendly.org is that the author (J.D. Frazer) is not afraid to say anything - this comic is not toned down in any way! As a result, it captures the sentiment of the time and topic perfectly! I am sure that there are dart boards in Microsoft and the RIAA that have J.D. Frazer’s face on it…..