The American left who has opposed action in Iraq (and in many cases Afghanistan before that) has increasingly latched on to the myth that "Bush lied". The theory is that Bush "sold" intervention in Iraq based on stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And since we've found no massively stockpiles (we have found some WMDs just not in large quantities) we therefore (they argue) went into Iraq based on a false premise. This is total nonsense. Besides the usual facts that ...
We went to South Padre Island on vacation for a week. It was a great time! Here's the hotel we stayed at. Ryan and I in the pool. Ryan on the beech collecting shells. We caught a lot of sand crabs at night. We'd just catch them and then let them go once we finished. We caught 34 in one evening without even trying very hard. The kids loved it. Debbie, Ryan and Alex trying to smile into the sun. The boys sleeping.
In business negotiations I work off a fairly straight forward principle: Enlightened self interest. This principle has many other terms that describe it. Win-Win, success has many fathers, to name two. I don't approach negotiations as a zero sum game. With partners and employees, we try to do everything we can to make sure they benefit from the deal as much as possible as long as we too are benefiting at an acceptable level. Why? Because having other people rooting for your success i...
Without customer loyalty, a company is doomed. That is especially true of small companies. Take customers for granted and sooner or later, your company will find itself on hard times without loyal customers to see you through it. It was loyal customers that saved Stardock when the OS/2 market collapsed and the company had to migrate to Windows. Loyal Stardock customers purchased Object Desktop for Windows in 1998 even though there was little to it at the time. Object Desktop...
The soap opera on the Macintosh platform continues apace as more details on the next version of MacOS X come out. In our last episode, we saw lots of debates over whether Apple's upcoming Dashboard is ripping off Konfabulator (a popular MacOS X program that has similar widget features as DesktopX has). There's a lot of debate on this and I think the final question is this: If Konfabulator didn't exist, would MacOS X have Dashboard. We can debate that all day but I think the an...
Some of you may recall that back in very early May we predicted that Kerry would pick Richard Gepthardt as his running mate. Why? Because in The Political Machine simulations, the AI version of John Kerry kept wanting a running mate to win Iowa or Missouri. AI controlled John Kerry realized that he only needed to win one of those two states in the election to essentially wrap up the white house. At the beginning of June we noticed that that the governor of Iowa was a Democrat so we added To...
For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the MacOS X "Tiger" controversy (i.e. those of you who are normal with lives!) here's our story so far... On July 28 Apple introduced the new version of MacOS X coming out next year code-named "Tiger" at the big Macintosh developers conference. Included there were these big banners: Plus this cute graphic: Here are the key features of Tiger in a nutshell: Built in good searching iChat AV (video chatting) Dashboard ...
Most people pay hardly any taxes to the federal government. In fact, half the adult population (50%) only pays around 4% of the total federal tax burden. The other half pays the other 96%. Sadly, most of those taxes are poorly used. The works of government that affect you on a day to day basis are handled by the state. My state income taxes (here in Michigan) is a flat 4% of income (not counting sales tax and property taxes). Here's a chart of what you pay on a state by state basis: ht...
Sometimes in my writings I probably come across as unsympathetic to the "less fortunate". That is probably true to a certain extent. Mainly, I'm a crummy writer so I tend to write my opinions in ways that grate. But also it's because I grew up poor -- for an American. I lived amongst other poor people and know from first hand experience what kinds of things makes a person poor and what kinds of things can make someone wealthy. Of course, bear in mind, in the United States, most people who say...
On the way back from vacation my mild summer cold turned into ETD. Eustachian tube dysfunction. What is ETD? It's basically where fluid behind the eardrums gets locked in there usually due to swelling or some other blockage. The net result is that your ear is plugged and it's very annoying. It's like having water in your ears but not having a way to get it out. I've now had it for 5 days and it's driving me crazy. On Friday, I'd finally had enough. We called the doctor's office and I...
In a comment to an article about racism, someone from Australia made the absurd claim that Australia is the most multi-cultural country in the world. Not to be outdone, someone from Canada claimed the mantle for Canada. What's next? Someone from Japan making that claim? Here are some statistics on the racial make up of a few selected countries: Australia: Caucasian 92%, Asian 7%, aboriginal and other 1% Canada: Canada has diversity if you count various types of white people...
In one of the multitides of Michael Moore related blogs, one Moore defender essentially argued that unless you could debunk Moore's various conspiracy theories then we have no reason not to believe them. Their position, essentially, was that crackpot theories are true until proven false. Which is absurd. It's much easier for crank out a crackpot theory than to spend the time debunking it. In my opinion, Michael Moore's books and films are little more than well produced and polished crackpot t...
I'm back from vacation. It was great to go to the gulf of Mexico with the wife and kids. We had a blast. Coming home was a bit of a pain due to weather and my summer cold came back to haunt me. My right ear is totally plugged up. Lots of crazy stuff happened last week. Apple announced MacOS 10.4 code-named "Tiger" with a feature called Dashboard . Dashboard is similar to DesktopX but it is really a knock-off of a Mac program called Konfabulator . Not that the Apple-does-no-wr...
Most of the propaganda peddled in Michael Moore's new Fahrenheit 9/11 basically boils down to playing tricks with the old 6 degrees of separation concept and crude manipulation of statistics. As I wrote in my other article, I don't tend to have a lot of patience for gullible people. People who buy into propaganda strike me as weak minded. If someone buys into some crackpot conspiracy theory I don't tend to feel like I should put in the effort to debunk it. It's a lot easier to fabricate a biza...
Spiderman is now in movies and yes, it rocks. If you hated the first one you will still hate this one. But for everyone else, you definitely don’t want to miss what I think is probably the best super hero movie of all time. Though, X-Men 2 was pretty good too. What really struck me about this movie was how much of it is really about Peter Parker. This movie is much less “cheesy” than the first one. It’s much more about how ordinary people are having to deal with extraordinary events. Pet...