I've been trying to talk my wife out of living in Michigan for something like a gagillion years.  Not that Michigan is awful. It's not.  It has beautiful Spring and Falls and summers are quite pleasant.  And our part of Michigan (south eastern), is no more north than Northern California.  On the other hand, Michigan has terrible roads.  Sure, there's no traffic compared to say New York or California but they're full of pot-holes.  The excuse is that trucks in Mi...

Here's some interesting links I came across while surfing tonight: Military use of nanotech: http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/03/military_uses_o.html Slashdot review of a game design book: http://books.slashdot.org/books/05/03/29/1926206.shtml?tid=206&tid=6&tid=10 Return of the Mac: http://paulgraham.com/mac.html Revenge of the Sith Comic book covers: http://www.theforce.net/episode3/story/Revenge_of_the_Sith_Comic_Book_Covers_90657.asp Today's Best of the W...

Once JoeUser goes through its speed/architecture overhaul we plan to offer premium accounts for users. One of the features will be photo albums. Here's an example of what they'll be like from what we are about to launch on WinCustomize.com: http://frogboy.wincustomize.com/photos.aspx The adding of photos is really the key though. It's incredibly slick -- a built in ActiveX control (soon to be Java) enables me to see thumbnails of images that are on my hard drives and select as many as...

What a week it's been.  We have guests from Europe this week and I'm one of those guys who normally sleeps in until 10am.  But i've been having to get up at 8:30am. Yea yea I know poor baby. But I'm tired.. And now I'm hungry..

If you haven't used Feedster, it's worth checking out for searching blogs. www.feedster.com .   No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

JoeUser is not just slow but it's been flakey lately. It's been very frustrating for me to deal with that. The site's traffic has increased considerably in just the past few months. From 120,000 visitors in November to 160,000 already in February. But that's not what's causing the problem. It's WinCustomize which shares the same databases as JoeUser.com. Its traffic has climbed from 10.2 MILLION visitors in November to almost 17 MILLION so far this month in 24 days. But it's not like t...

Issue Conservative Liberal Abortion   X Environment   X Religion   X Military   X   Taxes X   Social Services X   I'm a conservative on the key issues of the day. Taxes, Military Policy, and Social Services. But I'm liberal on many too. Pro-Choice, Pro-Environmental policy, Not religious.  I also support civil unions for gay couples (though not marriage). Don't get m...

If it seems like JoeUser.com hasn't been getting much loving from Stardock lately, it's because it hasn't.  It's not that we don't love all of you and JoeUser.com, it's just that we only have so many developers and so little time to put into each project. And while JoeUser.com does attract many thousands of users each week, WinCustomize.com attracts almost 4 million each week. And WinCustomize.com had been severely negletected for so long. This month, all our sites will be making a cr...

So here I am, back in my office. I like my job but wow, I really preferred to be home. Had a great vacation though.  Finished Knights of the Old Republic II.  Pretty disappointed with the rushed ending and the plot lines that didn't make any sense at all to me.  The first one was magnificient. The new one is absurd and has gaping holes in its plot. Played quite a bit of World of Warcraft.  I'm Draginol on the Uther server.  Trying to come up with a good tabard for ...

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!!

As far as I know, JoeUser.com is the only blog community on the Internet.  There are various blog services out there but each blog is an island. That is, they are completely isolated from other sites on there. The downside of the way we have JoeUser is that it's hard to avoid having the opinions of those who you dislike show up on your page somewhere as part of the "newest" or "featured" and the like.  Of course, as some people who have left JoeUser because of those reasons have le...

Joeuser.com is unique in the sense that it is a blog community. We all have our own individual blogs that then make up a greater blog (so to speak). During the political season, it was really a challenge to keep the overall community from becoming radicalized. Anyone who has ever run a community knows there are very specific dyanmics that tend to work towards making a community radicalized. The primary dynamic is critical mass. Critical mass in this sense being where enough vocal supp...

Interesting discussion from Roger Simon's site. - I voted against a blatantly biased media that applied a double standard in their reporting that surpassed belief. I voted against a media that believed they could get more credible witnesses to Kerry's Vietnam experience by traveling to Vietnam than they could get from 254 Americans, including retired Admirals and a Congressional Medal of Honor winner. I voted against a media that attempted to smear a sitting president using patently bogus...

In a poll on DemocraticUnderground.org, over 70% of its users responded that 11/3 was a worse day for them than 9/11. Kind of puts things in perspective..well not really.

Here's the money quote: The Guardian, the fever chart of the British Left, decided to arrange a controlled experiment in the effectiveness of the Bush-hating strategy. They targeted the voters of Clark County, Ohio, one of the swingiest counties in a critical swing state, by getting Guardian readers to send them letters explaining why they shouldn't vote for Bush. Antonia Fraser, John Le Carre and other celebrated Guardianistas put pen to paper and marshalled their arguments. Richard D...