I decided to exile one of our more vocal users for a day after sending him an email. I had meant to do it last week when he got caught using a fake user to create a second account to disparage his various enemies (real or imagined). It was designed as a shot across the bow. I don't really like exiling anyone because it takes energy to do that (i.e. I don't like doing things that negative affect others) when I really have a lot of other things to work on. Things with JoeUser.com have gone diff...

Ever have to deal with people who just suck the energy out of your day?  For most people, I suspect it's a coworker or boss.  Someone who comes to your office or cube or whatever and says something in such a way that seems almost designed to piss you off. I don't run into that much since I don't have a boss.  But it still happens sometimes with business "partners". Sometimes when working with much larger companies on a project there is the tendancy for some high up project mana...

Holy cow what a week it's been.   First off, sorry JoeUser.com has been so buggy this week. We launched the new WinCustomize.com this week and it's using all new ASP.NET technology and we had some bugs in it that caused it to overwhelm the server.  It's still pretty intensve but it's getting much better.  But the result was that it was bringing JoeUser.com to its knees. Monday and Tuesday I spent in New York. Got home Wednesday morning (last flight out).  Yesterday I ...

Tomorrow I leave on a trip to New York. And so I'm here at work trying to do a bunch of things that need to get done before I got.  Naturally that means every piddly little technical thing blows up. Things that normally work fine go wrong.  I walk in the door and my car alarm goes off. I walk into my office and I get a good static shock. I turn on my laptop and get a blue screen. My copy of GalCiv 2 doesn't work on my laptop. Got a paper cut when shuffling papers around. Ran out of sta...

This week I'm here in New York to meet with the media.  Since I wrote the artificial intelligence in The Political Machine (which recently won Editor's Choice from the top gaming publication) there is understandably some interest in how Bush and Kerry behave differently in the game versus real life. Of course, since it's a game, there's a lot of differences. But that's for another discussion - one on TV that is. But media tours are hectic affairs. My trip out here was long scheduled. ...

Executive Summary: I'm the President & CEO of Stardock Corp. Beyond the usual strategic management work, I am also directly involved with the day to day operations of several of our key projects. I also do a lot of writing, skinning and programming. Below is a partial summary of my background. Most Important Talent: Really really fast typer. Education Graduated in 1994 with a degree in Electrical Engineering with specialty of Computer Engineering. Taught Elec...

Every day is a battle. A battle between fight or flight. A battle between positive and negative interpretation. One of the things I've learned over the years is that happiness and unhappiness are largely chemical states in the brain.  Things like money and material wealth don't help with happiness. They can, at best, limit the number of negative vectors. That is, decrease the number of things that can cause stress. But the clever mind can always find new things to work with.  ...

  Draginol is a character in a series of unpublished stories I've been writing for the past 20 years. Draginol is the main villain in the stories he's in. My first job was taking out the garbage for my neighbors in the apartment complex we lived in for 10 cents per bag. I was 5 years old when I started the trash service. I will tend to lose my equilibrium on airline flights unless I take a prescribed drug. I was 33 the first time I got a cold serious enough to require m...

It's been another long week.  I went to bed at 6:30am this morning, got up at around 10am and worked until around 11pm.  My schedule is pretty screwed up at this point.  But I think we've turned the corner in terms of work.  GalCiv stuff... We got Galactic Civilizations II 1.0X out the door.  I certainly hope it's "good enough".  It's really difficult to tell on so many different systems. I always get worried that we'll put something out and there will be s...

Last year the family and I tried to go to Higgins Lake for vacation.  I can't find the blogs on it. Which reminds me, we need a calendar interface for accessing blogs as I know when I blogged about it. Anyway, it was a bit of a disaster. The cabin we rented was supposed by be "by the beach" but I think they meant "by the beech" as in tree.  It was across a fairly busy street from a dirty wad of sand. This year, we didn't even try to get something next to the beach.  We opt...

I'm having one of those days today. I was supposed to give a class to our marketing & sales team today on how to effectively use Frontpage. So I brought in my trusty ThinkPad T40 laptop that I practically live on, fired it up, and got a blue screen saying that I had a corrupted volume. Luckily, it's NTFS so I can recover my data. But it's going to be a full reinstall on that computer. The other hassle is trying to get into the new building.  Stardock has purchased a new building in P...

The last couple weeks have been very rough at work. I've been doing more hours than I care to.  Last week I did approximately 77 hours.  This week I'll probably do another 60. Had a major negotiation with a major publisher to license their trademark fall apart today. Months of effort wasted. The terms had been agreed on but the lawyers killed it. Every little detail had to be micro-managed, signed off on by every party, to a scale that was simply unmanageable. It would hav...

Okay, it's going on 3am and my brain is starting to not function which means it's time to go home. I can say that DesktopX 2.4's bundled widgets, objects, and themes are going to rock.  We included a cool corporate desktop template in there and we are including a lot more interesting DesktopX objects that people can use to build their desktop up with. We aren't including quite as many widgets but instead are trying to include better widgets.  That said, I did run into quit...

I get a lot of email. I mean I really get a lot of email. Approximately 1,500 email per day.  Of that 1,500 about 1000 of it is spam (or at least filtered out as spam).  Of the remaining 500, about 200 of it is spam that didn't get caught leaving 300.  Of that 300 about half of it (200) I either don't need to respond to or can optionally respond to. That leaves around 100 email per day that needs to be responded to.  At 3 minutes on average per email, that would be 5 h...

When things are tough, what are your sources for coping? Here’s a brief list of mine. My wife My kids My sister-in-law The people I work with Learning new “Tech” Internet Communities Learning new things Helping others Passing on skills to others Reading a good book.