I came home from vacation early. Higgins Lake is great...when it's not raining and when it's not cold. I have a dream of going on vacation for 2 weeks each year.  I went one a one week vacation earlier this summer and that went well but the Higgins Lake thing was a bust weather-wise. But we still had a good time.  Just as well though, The Political Machine got released while we were gone and should be at a store near you if you're in the United States. If you check out this week...

Alternative shells are shells created by third parties meant to replace Explorer.  When you boot up Windows, you have Explorer, it's what provides the Start bar/menu at the bottom and the recycle bin and other desktop icons you are probably familiar with. Many users argue (and I agree with them) that Explorer is pretty bloated for what it does. And it can be flaky. In response, they've banded together to create a category of Windows customization called alternative shells. Liteste...

This is a screenshot of Konfabulator. A MacOS X program for displaying widgets.  Occasionally people will argue that nothing like this is available on Windows. But DesktopX has existed on Windows for years. Its popularity has steadily grown. Last week it was the 6th most popular desktop enhancement download on CNET Download.com with over 10,000 downloads last week. It's not exactly obscure. One thing that is without dispute is that the typical MacOS skinner seems to have more artisti...

I monitor technical support channels at Stardock on occasion and whether it be games or non-games, it seems many people, even in the age of Windows XP, tend to reboot their computers far more often than is necessary. Generally speaking, you shouldn't have to reboot your machine. Even if it seems "hosed" odds are you just need to restart some program.  This guide is by no means comprehensive but it's a good start in getting you to not have to reboot. 1) Restart Explorer.  If all e...

So we went up to Higgins Lake.  Had a good time there, particularly thanks to visiting with family there.  My family isn't very large, there's not many of us. Since college, I haven't been very good at staying in touch with my family. Which is pretty lame on my part because there aren't that many people to stay in touch with. But when my sons came along and work started to be a little less crazy, I decided it was time to start trying to provide them the sort of rich experienc...

Currently on vacation up north at the lake but it's raining and I have my laptop with me with my cell phone. Was doing some searching on the web and came across this article (below) about the liberal media bias. It's quite an interesting read.

I'm going on vacation tomorrow for a week. Hopefully the site will still be here when I get back.   The irony is that next week The Political Machine will be released. It was on CNN Headline News yesterday. I'm working on a post mortem on the game for Game Developer.  One of the things we'll be talking about is the fact that we used DesktopX to develop the game screens and then created a DirectX backend to read in the DesktopX objects and blit them in a full screen game. ...

Frankly, I'm just astounded at some of the bickering and pettiness I see in the forums. There are hundreds of regulars but a few dozen have coalesqed into cliques. I personally don't get into on-line cliques. But I don't think there's anything inherently bad about them. The Internet should be whatever you make of it. As long as you're not hurting anyone, knock yourself out. Meet friends, talk to them, etc. I only worry about cliques when they start to resemble gangs. And I see a couple "ri...

I find it amazing that the group of people most identified with worshipping the first amendment seem to be the ones most intolerant of opinions other than their own. For months we've seen left wing groups like MoveOn.org creating anti-Bush commercials that are only vaguely factual.  Celebrities have lent their voices to unseating George W. Bush.  Bruce Springsteen, for example, is currently doing a "Get Bush Out" concert tour (John Mellencamp wrote a song called "Bush is just another t...

Right Wing News ( www.rightwingnews.com ), has an interesting discussion about building up your blog's popularity.  I feel a lot better having read it because I thought I was the only one who felt some of the frustrations he's felt.   JoeUser.com hasn't "officially" launched yet. We're still technically in beta (i.e. we haven't done any promotion).  Our Alexa ranking is around 25,000. Sometimes it shoots up when something written here gets particular attention bu...

Here's a good fisking of Fisk. http://www.nicedoggie.net/archives/004502.html Meanwhile, another fisking of a leftwing journalist who seems to be obsessed with "world jewry" (I tell ya, there are a lot of leftists who seem paranoid about what Jewish people are doing). http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/007276.php Okay, only those two.  I'm just playing around with Blog Nav pro tonight.

It's really odd having a turtle that is older than you.  Cuddles, the family turtle, is around 50 years old now. I got him when I was a teenager and here, now at 33, we still have him. I've read that box turtles can live a century, so who knows, my kids may one day be fighting over Cuddles.

One of the things that probably annoys some users of JoeUser (bloggers in particular) is the syndication of other articles and forum posts into their blog.  Why did we do that? the goal of JoeUser is very egaltarian. When I'd set up JoeUser as my personal blog I saw the pros and cons of blogging it alone.  As it got more popular, I became aware of a barrier to entry into the wider world. Basically, my blog was at the mercy of an established order of elite blogs. It ...

I'm pretty jazzed but I think we're getting close to where you'll be able to start posting articles via blog nav pro.  Which is much fatser than going through the web interface.

I'm really frustrated with the 4 year old.  We have two children, a 7 year old and a 4 year old.  They couldn't be more different.  Both have traits that make them very lovable. But the 4 year old has been a real challenge to raise so far. The 7 year old is kind, gentle, and full of empathy.  The 4 year old, to put it mildly, is not.  He's cute and has his moments of sweetness.  But he will also seemingly go out of his way to break things. This morning he cam...