Right Wing News has some outstanding articles about the situation that Bush is in. One that I particularly agree with is that Bush is losing conservatives through his pandering. While I support Bush on his foreign policy, for the most part, I am strongly against some of the domestic choices he's made: The Tax Cut. I favor tax cuts. We are over-taxed. But a payroll tax would have been more effective I think for stimulating the economy. Deficits. I care about deficits. I care about the...

Last night I came home early so that I could focus on the Object Desktop 2004 documentation. It's finally finsihed or at least good enough to go up on Stardock Central. 120 or so pages of "stuff". And it only covers 5 major components of Object Desktop. But still, it's far better than what we previously had -- NOTHING. I need to take Martin's excellently done SkinStudio documentation and make it available as a stand alone PDF document. Very pleased with how that turned out even if the examp...

Based on electoral politics and some analysis here is how the campaign is shaping up. First, Kerry is going to win New Hampshire by a large margin. New Hampshire primary prediction based on local demographics, polling, and momentum: Kerry: 39% Dean: 25% Edwards: 13% Clark: 6% Which brings us to our second point: it's all over for Lieberman.  It's also over for Clark. Lieberman will end his campaign after New Hampshire. It's also over for Clark. Edwards will be in a very difficu...

I sometimes think that the Internet is destroying the civility of political discourse. Many of my friends and I debate politics on a regular basis. Because we're friends, we know that each of us has views based on a set of honest, well thought-out principles. We aren't debating purely for trying to score points in some sort of imaginary game. We are exchanging ideas and beliefs and making each other think about those ideas and beliefs. But on the Internet, things are different. Civility is in...

So I got WinCustomize magazine done. It took quite a bit of work. The work not only derives itself from the actual writing but the research for it. Two big things I do in the magazines is sift through all the...well crap that gets submitted and have to narrow things down to highlighting 30 or so skins and themes to show off. That means I have to skip over a lot of good stuff too which is a bummer but I have to focus on things that casual users will want, not just power users. With >800,000 Wi...

Here are some desktop objects and themes from January from WinCustomize.com that look particularly interesting.  You will need DesktopX in order to use these.   Alien Bone     Rubicon Weath...

Meetings eat up increasingly greater amounts of my time. In a theoretical 8 hour day today, I spent 4 hours of them in meetings. That leaves 4 hours to do actual "work". Widgets to do: [X] IconPackager Media Guide finished/checked/printed [X] Went over JoeUser.com and featured some articles [X] GalCiv Beta testing [X] GalCiv Beta went up (not really any work on my part, just had to press the trigger) [X] DesktopX 2.1 testing [X] GalCiv screenshots [X] IconPackager PR. Meetings: ...

So you want to create icons eh? In the bad old days, creating icons was quite a pain. Probably the best thing that's happened to PC icon creation is Windows XP. That's because Windows XP supports alpha channels in its icons. Alpha channels allow for icons to anti-alias themselves. Or put another way, they don't look so blocky because the edges can blend in to your wallpaper or the folder background or whatever. This has been a boon to both professional and amateur icon authors.  Previou...

I've lost quite a bit of time this week m igrating to Outlook. I am sure it'll be wonderful when I finsih but in the meantime it's been a major pain. The main issue with it has been moving the hundreds of thousands of emails I've received in Outlook Express over the past 4 years over to it. I took advantage of my not-completely-fair flex time to simply go home while the migration took place which took several hours to read in all the files and then remove the tens of thousands of duplicates. ...

A lot of people don't realize how cool IconPackager is. Heck, a lot of people don't even know what IconPackager is. Let me start at the beginning: IconPackager is a program for letting you change virtually all your Windows icons. Microsoft's "themes" can only change a handful.  IconPackager was the first program to go beyond that to change nearly all your icons. It was actually quite difficult to develop because early on Windows did not cooperate with that sort of thing bu...

I am a very lucky guy. My wife is truly my partner in life. We share our lives together in ways that I could scarcely have ever hoped. We have very complementary roles in our home. She is the home maker as well as someone who helps with the company as time permits. But she makes home making into a true art. For example, when I come home from work, I never know what wonderful and new thing she'll have made for our family. Tonight was salmon with fresh strawberries (in January!), fresh bea...

Richard Gephardt's presidential hopes seem to be coming to an end. I would blame much of that on his poor understanding of the electorate. There's a saying in politics, "It's all about the numbers." Gephardt, who kept claiming polls don't mattered, should have realized that polls do matter and only sounded desperate when trying to deny this reality. But you have to give him credit, he truly seemed to believe that polls don't matter. Like I said, he just doesn't seem to understand ...

It's going to be close in Iowa. According to Zogby , it's a dead-heat with John Kerry taking a slight lead. But most people don't realize how the Iowa Caucus works. It's not a straight vote.  It's really a series of meetings to pick delegates. Each precinct has a different number of delegates to pick based on the number of registered democrats in that precinct. And the rule is that a candidate must get 15% of the delegates to be viable. So let's say there are 10 delegates availabl...

George W. Bush seems to have some sort of Crazedar. That is, he sends out some sort of subliminal signal to those on the left that drives them insane and lose all sense of perspective. This hasn't just affected politicians and activists, it's affected journalists too. So incensed are some left-winger journalists and activists that they have gone off and formed a new media network to combat the "growing right wing media influence". It's called Central Air Media . There's a certain militancy ...

My wife and I went out to see "Big Fish". Big Fish is a movie in which a son must try to put together the real life story of his father. The dying father spent his life telling his son tall tales of his life. Rather than telling a story as "just the facts", the father flavored his story leaving his adult-aged son bewildered. What is true and what is fantasy? The movie goes through the father's life as he told it. A truly remarkable, even seemingly impossible string of adventures that let th...