Be careful what you wish for. Saying "Oh, I wish I could stay here another day.." can sometimes make it come true.  Our flight is canceled so here we are, still in the Gulf of Mexico.

In the world of skinning, the # of creators to consumers has, over time gotten to the point where it's nearly all consumers and almost nobody is creating the content. I'm seeing a little of this in blogging. Joeuser's traffic has been improving at a pretty good pace as the servers have gotten faster again and the reliability has improved. But there's fewer new blogs to read through.  Of course, weather is getting nicer and we don't promote JoeUser for new bloggers, but it's still an i...

JoeUser may be a neat site but it hasn't been IMO a very reliable site. Down times, slow speeds, flakey behavior, bugs, etc.  On the one hand, it's free, so how can we complain? But on the other hand, it's still been down, slow, flakey, and buggy and that just because you're free doesn't mean that you're above criticism. But in the past few days, we've finally started the full upgrade process on our entire server farm.  Shortly after GalCiv II shipped, we did some emergency updates ...

Since Thanksgiving, I've worked every day, 7 days a week, including Christmas other than last weekend where I took one day off.  Why?  What drives me isn't money. I'm a computer geek. What money I have I put into computer hardware and other gadgets and most of that is taken care of by the company. I do have a nice car . I drive it the whole 6.2 miles back and forth to the office.  But that's about it.  I don't even have a big screen TV.  My main TV isn't even high-d...

I took my son to Best Buy to get Galactic Civilizations II.  I wonder how many of his friends believe his dad makes computer games? Probably not many. LOL.

As mentioned previously, the new servers have arrived and the coding team has been working around the clock to optimize code and make tweaks. JU is back! Hopefully you can already tell a performance increase.  

Our achilles heel.  Stardock's server farm has a lot of redundancy. But it has a bottle neck that until the last few months wasn't really a bottleneck. It's a server called Marvin.  Marvin is our Stardock.net account server.  It traditionally hasn't been that busy, but as more and more sites start using it, it's gotten bad. Very bad. The long term solution is to cluster it and use replication to mirror accounts onto other machines to load balance. But that's going to take ti...

Every community, especially one as close-knit as JU's is going to have melodrama.  Sometimes, it's like watching a car wreck. You don't want to look but it's hard not to. Drama, intrigue, gossip, they're hard to resist. I tend to be a pretty plain person.  I think that's why I've stayed interested in on-line communities for so long or at least survived them this long.  Being straight forward and consistent is, in my opinion, the key to thriving long-term in an on-line commu...

I'm feeling pretty cranky today.  This week.  This month. Part of it has to do with not having had a single day off since Thanksgiving.  I even worked on Christmas day.  Every day. 7 days a week.  A few weeks ago I pulled a 111 hour week.  The last week or so I did over 80. I'm tired. Very tired. Last week I had to temporarily take down JoeUser since the site, which is not a business enterprise, eats up around 30% of the database bandwidth of our critical ...

The GalCiv II launch was a much greater success than we ever imagined. Of course, that also meant it was a much bigger load on the servers so we had to keep JoeUser.com down a little longer than we expected. But we're back now! Sorry for any inconvenience.

Due to the popularity of JoeUser.com, we're going to have to schedule a couple days of outage when GalCiv II launches so that all the database bandwidth is available for it.  We apologize for the inconvenience.

JoeUser.com is a pretty popular site.  Ranked in the top 20,000 websites worldwide, it gets a decent chunk of traffic. But compared to some of our other sites, it's a drop in the bucket. We had the site down today as we tried to narrow down what was eating up our database bandwidth. Answer: JoeUser. This Spring we're going to have to revisit how JoeUser is coded and figure out why it's so intensive.  Part of it has to do with how database driven it is.  The content you are s...

Merry Christmas everyone! It's hard to believe that we've been doing this now for over three years!  Wherever you are, have a wonderful holiday! And with that, whatcha get?

My younger son isn't doing so well with his academic career.  At least so far.  Luckily, it's just kindergarten.  But according to his teacher, he's at the very bottom of his class in both numbers and letters.  He's 5.  And can only count to 13.  Can't spell his name and hasn't quite gotten the whole alphabet down.  The teacher explained this to us in our parent-teacher conference. I asked, "Well, is it possible that he's...well...you know..just..dumb?"&...

Atrophe. I think that's how you spell it. I could look it up but that would be work. And that brings me to my problem - I've become so lazy that my muscles are starting to atrophe.  I think I should do something about that..but yet..the chair beckons..