Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Technology

The information Laundromat
Whispernumber.com is beating the best minds of Wall Street -- but nobody really knows how.
By Mark Gimein
[10/26/99]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 27 Results
Yachoo, Yaltavista and other "re-branded" sites.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[10/26/99]

Technology: View from the top
Local explosion
Dan Finnigan, president of Knight Ridder New Media, talks about how "the No. 1 newspaper chain on the Internet" is destined to be the king of online local news.
By Janelle Brown
[10/25/99]

Books
Adventures in Silicon Valley
Hilarious and incisive, Michael Lewis' "The New New Thing" captures the elusive spirit of Silicon Valley.
By Mark Gimein
[10/22/99]

The war for America's thumbs
The stakes are huge and the combatants are mighty -- who will win the war for video-game console supremacy?
By Greg Costikyan
[10/21/99]

Complete archives for Technology

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Welcome to the world of "User Friendly" a smart and quirky cartoon born of the open-source movement and championed by geeks across the Net. What began two years ago as a doodle that was passed around the office of a Canadian Internet service provider is now a fledgling comic empire, with a popular daily Web site, a new book, a global readership and an upcoming army of cuddly plush toys and desktop tie-ins.

"User Friendly" takes you into the depths of a small ISP called Columbia Internet -- a place where tech support staff live on vile coffee and Quake frag-fests, where system administrators battle to prevent Microsoft software from being installed on their servers, and where stupid customer service calls are the bane of everyone's existence. "User Friendly" is equal parts open-source humor and everyday geek frustration -- a comic strip in which a real computer is a Pentium server running Linux, and hell is a pink iMac.

Populating this world are Pitr, the Russian sys-admin with a fake accent; Greg, the frustrated tech support guru who spends his time mastering Quake; Stef, the brainless marketing guy who longs to be CEO; Miranda, the sexpot supergeek who hates drooling males; and a host of other nerds. Plus there are a few odd non-human characters: Erwin, the trouble-making artificial intelligence and the Dust Puppy -- a strange fuzzball with feet that was born from the lint at the back of a forgotten server. Even Tux the penguin makes an occasional appearance.

"User Friendly" is penned by "Illiad" -- in real life, a 33-year-old Canadian named J.D. Frazer. Frazer is, surprisingly, not a coder or a system administrator; instead, he's a good-natured non-techie who has held down jobs across the board, from working for a travel magazine to a stint as a corrections officer ("When I was younger and foolisher," he winces). Frazer boasts a lifelong passion for cartoons (the Dust Puppy was, in fact, conceived when he was 12 years old), and even attempted (and failed to sell) a syndicated cartoon before scoring with "User Friendly."

Frazer adopted the name Illiad as his Net pseudonym several years ago, inspired by his classical studies and his favorite Homeric poem. "I added another L so I could differentiate between that Iliad and me," he says, "and I was also hoping it would be an unusual name that no one else would pick up. I was desperately wrong -- I've run across a lot of other Illiads out there."

"User Friendly" was born during his time as the creative director of a Canadian ISP (In the strip, A.J. is his alter ego); his doodles and cartoons of inner-office dramas won fans among his co-workers and his boss, who encouraged him to post the cartoons online. Geek Web communities like Slashdot, Blues News and Segfault quickly found his Web site and promoted the strip; as the open-source movement exploded over the last two years, so did his fans.

Today, Frazer's Web site boasts 300,000 unique readers a month (with pass-on rates, he figures he probably hits five times that number). Frazer quit his job at the ISP six months ago, and now makes "User Friendly" his full-time passion. His first book, "User Friendly -- The Comic Strip," was released earlier this month by open-source publisher O'Reilly & Associates , appropriately enough, and has proven a hit.

Next page | Open-source geeks feed ideas to the cartoonist