Our software, DesktopX, was on TechTV's "The Screen Savers" yesterday. The Screen Savers is one of the favorite shows here. Some of us subscribe to satellite just to get it in. But as happy as we were to be on there, not everything went according to plan. You see, we knew back in late February that "In March" DesktopX was going to be on there. So we painstakingly put together this kit for them. A quick reviewer's guide. A print out of the full user manual. A CD with the latest versio...
Sometimes running a blog site is almost not worth the effort. I can see why so many blog sites are moving to charging money to use them. The amount of technical support I'm starting to receive in email from users is becoming problematic. What's worse, is that an increasing number of people are demanding technical support responses that are simply not realistic in something that we are providing for free. Let me give you an example. Someone named "Andrew" emailed me a couple of days a...
There are 3 Americas. The rich. The middle class and the poor. From the 1995 Census Bureau: Population: The rich: 6 million households The middle class: 52 million households The poor: 8 illion households Family: The rich: 4 out of 5 are married The middle class: 4 out of 5 are married The poor: 2 out of 5 are married The rich: <5% are single parents The middle class: <5% are single parents The poor: nearly 2 out of 3 are single parents Education The rich: >...
The problem I have debating people on welfare and other issues is well frankly, a lot of people are just incredibly ignorant. They just espouse platitudes without knowing what the hell they're talking about. It's a bit frustrating. No one expects everyone to be experts on what they choose to write about. But often times it's obvious that they haven't taken even a serious glance at the facts behind the issue they speak of. I don't mean "facts" as in from some left-wing or right-wing website. I me...
Recently there was some debate about the current fiscal deficit. When people talk about balancing the budget, it is important to know what we spend money on. When someone just parrots "We need to cut defense" or "raise taxes" it gets frustrating because those things won't necessarily solve the problem. The real problem is much more complex than that. In reality, the federal government has slowly morphed into a social program provider. Bush hasn't helped things either...
http://www.alphecca.com/archives/alarc022804.html#d Brice: Could you perhaps tell us about some of the policy initiatives of a Kerry administration? Kerry: Um, what? Brice: You know, what are your plans for stimulating job growth, fixing Social Security, protecting America's borders, Medicare, education, the nation's infra-structure-- Kerry: I fought in the Viet Nam war. That's my platform. Brice: I've listened to your speeches, watched your TV commercials, surfed you...
http://www.alphecca.com/archives/alarc022804.html#d Brice: Could you perhaps tell us about some of the policy initiatives of a Kerry administration? Kerry: Um, what? Brice: You know, what are your plans for stimulating job growth, fixing Social Security, protecting America's borders, Medicare, education, the nation's infra-structure-- Kerry: I fought in the Viet Nam war. That's my platform. Brice: I've listened to your speeches, watched your TV commercials, surfed you...
A constitutional amendment forbidding gay marriage? Ack. For the record, I oppose gay marriage. But I'm pro civil-unions. But I am definitely not in favor of mucking around with the constitution in order to thwart gays trying to twist the definition of marriage to now fit them. The issue is fairly complex. We could probably get a majority of people who would favor gays having the right to civil unions. The problem is that civil unions don't provide any federal rights. Civil unions provide th...
One thing that's a bit frustrating these days is that it's really hard to make good use of system RAM to improve your performance. In the good gold days of DOS. I could use HyperCache or SmartDrv or some other disk caching program and feel the performance improvements. For instance, in 1992 I had a 386SX with 8 megs of RAM which, back then, was immense. So when in DOS, I'd set SmartDrv to have a 4 meg cache. And when I loaded Windows 3.0, the hard drive barely crunched at all and the system i...
We have a huge debt. The debt is caused because the federal government spends more than it gets in. You either have to increase income or reduce expenses. The deficit is large enough and the debt so vast that raising taxes would not likely do the trick and besides, it rewards poor financial management. What pro-mommy government people don't realize, typically because they've never dealt with the government itself, is that the government is incredibly inefficient and incompetent. ...
We've been noticing an increasing tendancy of people to simply go and take a well known columnist's writings and simpy copy and paste the entire thing and submit it as their blog entry here on JoeUser.com. That violates the original author's copyright. You can use pieces of someone's article as part of your own article, that is known as "fair use". But you can't just wholesale copy someone else's work and submit it as your blog entry. Not only it is unethical but it creates a potential liab...
Randy, a long time Stardock customer dating back from the OS/2 days wrote me today an email that raised my flu-subdued spirits. He included a photo of all his Stardock stuff from over the past decade. Like me, he was a big advocate of OS/2 during the good old days. Randy was one of our first (I mean very first) customers. Lot of OS/2 software there and the Windows version there too. Thanks Randy! You made my day!
My wife and I are on a diet. I'm trying to lose about 10 pounds this year. The diet we're following calls for it to start with 3 days of cleansing the system of starches and sugars. It's not so much fasting as it is trying to get us over our addiction to starches and sugars. And holy cow am I an addict. I never realized how much in starches and sugars I consume each day. I would start out the day with French toast. Then grab a glazed donut or two on the way to work. For lunch, Penara Bread. ...
Some various pictures of the family... Quickie picture Wife Deb in the car Alex Ryan Alex with little snowman We used up all our snow to make the snowman!
When I speak on-line on various sites, including JoeUser.com about the role of government, it becomes apparent quickly that many people think of the government as some sort of independent entity that is not connected to us. Those people tend to favor having the government solve all kinds of problems, including problems better left to individuals to solve for themselves. People like me, as I discussed in the philosophies of the left and the right are wary of having the government do anythin...