Family and friends who have been outdoors with me have commented/observed that I don't get mosquito bites.  That isn't to say mosquitos never bite me but it's pretty uncommon.  I've never had the pleasure of having a mosquito bite to scratch. Now before someone thinks this is a conceit, consider what this means. Mosquitos don't think I'm good enough for them.  That's a level of rejection that, frankly, I'm not really able to handle well. This weekend we went up north and me,...

For the first time in years I can happily say that JoeUser.com is running very very fast.  The server upgrade is a success.  Yay!

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.

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 ...

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...

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..

Last night the master database became corrupt and one of the machines had a catastrophic failure.  I kind of "perfect storm" of failure -- two bad things on two seperate servers.  For a few hours, JoeUser ceased to exist. It was the worst case scenario. However, LUCKILY, we do daily backups on all your blogs. So this incident can at least provide some assurance that all your hard work, your thoughts and written record are being treated with respect and care. It does mean, however...

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...