Holy cow what a week it's been.   First off, sorry JoeUser.com has been so buggy this week. We launched the new WinCustomize.com this week and it's using all new ASP.NET technology and we had some bugs in it that caused it to overwhelm the server.  It's still pretty intensve but it's getting much better.  But the result was that it was bringing JoeUser.com to its knees.

Monday and Tuesday I spent in New York. Got home Wednesday morning (last flight out).  Yesterday I worked until 1am, mostly trying to help get WinCustomize.com going and getting our various projects finished up

Today I have a ton of things on my plate. Spent some time talking to lawyers about non-competes. Someone we want to bring on has a rather nasty non-compete. The lawyers don't think it's a viable non-compete agreement because of a number of factors (such as the length of time and that it seems to be geographically fixated on Texas). 

Also spent time working on DesktopX stuff and helping get our new Marketing Coordinator fixed up with some of the things that I typically do.  So we did manage to release the Unorthodox skinpack at least so make sure you check that out.  But with WinCustomize having so many problems, it likely blunted the announcements.

But most of this evening was spent trying to figure out how to make WinCustomize faster. So that's why JoeUser.com was down.  JoeUser is kind of a pig too (as many of you know).  When we get WinCustomize figured out, we'll be spending some quality time on JoeUser to speed things up tremendously. We've learned a lot of stuff while working on the new WinCustomize. 

But here it is, 11:51pm and I'm still at work. My lovely wife was kind enough to bring the children in to see me and have dinner with them. I hadn't seen my oldest son, Alex, since Sunday! Christmas can't come soon enough. 

And despite spending a lot of time on email, I still have 471 email left to respond to. That's 471 NON-spam email (I get appoximately 2000 spam emails a day which get filtered out, any false positives I never see, I just never have time to look through them).  And I still have to put together the default widget/object/theme set for DesktopX 2.4, write a offer letter to a new employee, look over the press release for a new game, do a code-review on Galactic Civilizations II internal alpha 1, and finish the Galactic Civilizations: Prelude to War campaign.

Some of this is going to have to wait until tomorrow which means Friday's agenda will get mushed into Saturday.  So much stuff has to be set up for the holiday season. When so much of your business comes from individual users, you have to make sure things are ready at the right time and December is the busy month.

For Christmas, I just want to sleep, play with my sons, have some time with my wife, and read a good book.