Cowz

Bob ran this weekly strip at work. It started as a few isolated cartoons and progressed to a regular strip that ran for nearly a year.

The first cow cartoon. An old joke. July 1997.

A bunch of cow cartoons inspired by greek myths and a movie about a guy in the jungle. July 1997.

A bunch of really bad sea puns with cows. Prepare to groan. July 1997

Here are some of the cartoon strips from work. Many of the jokes revolve around life in a software company. Each of the cows corresponded to specific individuals on the software team. For some of them, there are explainations for those who are not geeks like the cartoonist. The missing ones were inside jokes with no general appeal.

Field guides. These show all the individual cows and who they corresponded to. Go here and here.

Cowz 1 Code cutoffs are deadlines when the software has to be done	Cowz 2
Cowz 3 Bugs are problems in the software.	Cowz 4 The hotspot code is a particularly complex and dreaded part of the software.
Cowz 7 Recorders are the notetakers at meetings.	Cowz 9 Microsoft issues logos to software makers whose products meet certain specifications. The marketing people eat it up when they can say we have a particularly important one.
Cowz 11 Ivan was the one who worked on the parts of the software that handled the Japanese language characters.	Cowz 13
Cowz 14 Anyone who has attended a trade show and listened to a boring presentation just to get the free giveaway will understand this one.	Cowz 15 Anyone who has worked with developers knows they hate to write product specifications.
Cowz 17	Cowz 18
Cowz 19 Time to pick features	Cowz 21 This one was inspired by a particularly challenging programming related class.
Cowz 22	Cowz 24 This one featured Ian as a cow. He is the little cow in the corner with the changing Star Wars spot. He was really into Star Wars at the time.
Cowz 25 We localize our products into French, German and Japanese.	Cowz 28 Inside joke, but some general appeal
Cowz 29 This was when a programmer transitioned from a group in the company who's mascot was a rubber chicken into our group.	Cowz 31
Cowz 33	Cowz 34 Negotiations with the "Evil Emipre" are challenging.
Cowz 35 Bob drew this one a little at a time on a whiteboard in the hallway. As the code cutoff approached, one of the cows was running around building the bleachers and guillotine. On the day of the actual cutoff, the banner and cows appeared revealing the finished cartoon	Cowz 36
Cowz 37	Cowz 39 Another tradeshow.
Cowz 40 We went to play whirlyball to celebrate a product release. Strange but fun game.	Cowz 41 This one was particularly popular.
Cowz 42 The boss got a promotion. The abbreviation for his new job was HAM. This transformation seemed obvious.	Cowz 44
Cowz 45 Picking the right type of doughnuts for the group meeting is so critical.	Cowz 47 We developed a process for handling any customer calls related to any Year 2000 issues. This pretty well summarized it. This was the last Cowz cartoon.