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...
If you've been coming to JoeUser for long, you've hopefully seen a gradual progression in the quality and features of the site. We've been heavily evaluating the various blog features and technologies out there. Some are really good. But some are just dumb. Here are some of my newbie view points on these issues. Feel free to comment and tell me where you agree or disagree. Good Blog Technologies RSS The Good: RSS is a standard that takes headlines from news sites (particularly blog sites...
Every registered user and every blog has points associated with it. These points are added together set up the different ranks of users and blogs on this site. Why have a point system at all? What motivated me to set this up was that I wanted to set up a medium in which people could write articles and that the popularity of that article would be based, at least in party, on merit. All too often, what gets read on the Internet is purely a matter of luck - some very popular website links to so...
Is it me or is the Internet overall very slow today?
There are basically two types of bloggers. And JoeUser.com is aimed at supporting both of them. Web Diarists The first type of blogger is the web diarist. This is a person who wants to be able to share his or her thoughts about their lives in a way that is recorded for the long haul. My wife fits more into this category. Years from now, she wants to be able to look back and be able to show that she did indeed think about things and do things besides change diapers and chase after our little...
Thoughts of the day... I updated my msstyles rant . It amazes me that someone out there would actually pay money to patch their uxtheme file. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't busted "companies" that make a profit selling cracks to the gullible. Tomorrow I'm speaking to U of M on software development and about the game industry. Tuesday I'm off to LA on business and won't be back until late Wednesday. I really hate traveling. I mean I can't understate it. I REALLY hate tr...
I often enjoy John Dvorak's columns. He's probably my favorite technical columnist out there. But at the same time, he is one of those people who makes rash predictions that are sometimes dead wrong. In fact, he's made so many bad predictions that he gave me the idea for a website - www.badpredictions.com that I registered almost 4 years ago. The idea was to let people submit entries that were either predictions already shown to be bad or ones likely to be bad: Who made a pred...
No matter where you are, have a merry Christmas!
When we created JoeUser.com to be database driven we used the existing Stardock.net user database. What that meant is that everything was based by "Handles" (think CB radios). My handle on most skin sites was/is "Frogboy". That's actually more of an accident than intentional as I had intended Draginol to be my handle which is what I used here. But when writing articles on such issues, I've always felt a bit uncomfortable using a handle because it implies I have some pseudonymn. That I'm...