Greetings, I know some of you clicking on this email are hoping that I’m here to tell you about Sins of a Solar Empire II.  I hope to be able to talk more about Sins of a Solar Empire more in the near future but today I wanted to make sure you know that we’re releasing a new RTS today that I think you might like: Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation. In many respects, it’s Sins of a Solar Empire on the surface of a planet. If you already know you want it, get it here: http:...

I’ve had JoeUser.com as my home but with two differnet IDs (draginol and frogboy) so thoroughly conflicted at this stage, I thought it would make sense to set up a site that combines them. My articles still get posted on all the Stardock sites (you might be reading this on JoeUser or WinCustomize or Sins of a Solar Empire. Who knows.  But now you can find all my stuff together at www.littletinyfrogs.com .

I have a standing opinion about people who take their forum disagreements into “real life”: They’re horrible people. This evening I was surfing the net and found someone who had been recently subjected to someone who disliked them on an Internet forum going out and taking out ads with their real name, address, etc. for the purposes of harassing them.  The person who did that is a horrible person. The irony, however, is that the victim of the harassment was someone who flamed me fo...

I just finished a really enjoyable book called The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution . Highly recommended. I’ve been planning my midlife crisis for awhile. These things need planning of course.  Last year I hit 40.  That’s the age where denial over middle age is over. It’s arrived. I’m a man of many interests. I just don’t know what to focus on nor do I know if I want to focus on anything in particular. The problem is incentive. I’d rather have more hours i...

Over the years I’ve found out what I’m good at: Business. At the same time, I know what I like to do: Software and game design. For awhile, I held the conceit that I was pretty decent at game design. But since hiring Derek (Kael) Paxton and Jon Shafer, I’ve come to realize that my skills at a game designer are much like my skills at graphics design or software development – I can do it in a pinch but I’m out of my league compared to a specialist. It’s a bit of a bummer. Actua...

Tomorrow is the 20 year class reunion for my high school. I can’t believe it’s been that long. For me, high school was not fun. Even with the benefit of hindsight the best I could describe the overall high school experience was “horrible”.  That it was horrible wasn’t due to my classmates (though certain classmates did make a bad situation worse but my main pain from high school is in prison serving a life sentence) but just the situation overall – I was a total nerd and HS isn’t...

People on-line seem to have a...need to give their opinion regardless of whether it's relevant or not. I see this particularly in the tech world where a new product gets announced and someone who wouldn't even use the program feels the need to comment "I wouldn't use that."  Whenever I see that, and it's often, my initial thought is, "Well who cares?" I just don't get it. I have no use for greeting card making programs, for example. When I see a news item about one, my first thought i...

This issue occasionally comes up and will almost certainly come up again in the future. That is, how does one go about getting something they've written on the home page of JoeUser.com. There is no simple answer to this. Instead, the best I can do is provide some general tips on two basic things: a) How the feature system works and How to make a good article. How the feature system works today Right now JoeUser.com hasn't even officially been launched. We've been tidying up features...

The store server crashed twice this weekend. Grrr.

In many ways, JoeUser is an experiement. It is the only blog site on the Internet that combines the strengths of all the individual bloggers together. When you make a post or comment on someone blog, it is distributed across the thousands of blogs here on this site. And, because JoeUser.com is so popular, your article is likely to get picked up on search engines. Which, needless to say, creates a temptation for abuse. People who intentionally try to humiliate others by taking advantage of the...

I'm a snob. I admit it. I've always been a snob to a certain level. My snobbery, however, is specific. I enjoy debating with people. To debate with people, you have to have people who don't agree with your positions. So I definitely like people who disagree with me feeling free to disagree with me. But like I said, I'm also a snob. And that means I don't have much toleration for noise. Being a snob means I tend to be rude when confronted with people who waste my time. If, having written a len...

Our software, DesktopX, was on TechTV's "The Screen Savers" yesterday. The Screen Savers is one of the favorite shows here. Some of us subscribe to satellite just to get it in. But as happy as we were to be on there, not everything went according to plan. You see, we knew back in late February that "In March" DesktopX was going to be on there. So we painstakingly put together this kit for them. A quick reviewer's guide. A print out of the full user manual. A CD with the latest versio...

Having a search engine also being the one who provides the ads makes for interesting reading. Check the bottom right of your blog and you'll see the google ads. But here's the kicker - the google ads are based on Google's search engine results. So you can see what kinds of people are visiting your site, to a degree, based on what types of things are being advertised. I was reading Tangled Wishes website and the ads were about personal relationships, meeting people, that sort of thing. I r...

Not too excited to hear Mexicans treating our soccer team this way . Booing the US national anthem and yelling "Osama" as a soccer game in Mexico helps make the case that the US really needs to secure the border. It's not just that Mexican illegal immigrants aren't assimilating as well as other cultures have for economic reasons, they're not assimilating because unlike other immigrants, there's a considerable number of them quite hostile to the US.  I have seen interviews with imm...