Saddam Hussein as captured during a lightning raid that apparently caught him quite unawares last night. CNN has a story on it here . This is good news on many levels. For one thing, as there is likely to be a trial for his war crimes, there will finally be more attention given to the horrors committed by this man and his regime. Opponents to the war in Iraq have been amazingly silent on all the evidence of mass murders committed by Saddam. The one that chilled me to the bone ...
Everything is too slow. I don't know how much of that is from Comcast and how much it is because WinCustomize.com is currently camped out on JoeUser's servers because its servers crashed. But it's frustrating. I like things to be fast. I'll pay a premium for them to be fast. That means when I click on a link, the link shows up right away. I wonder if anyone else is finding JoeUser slow. I know WinCustomize is slow but there's nothing that can be done about that. Not until after the hol...
Free Holiday Goodies from Stardock North Pole Showdown . Only you can save Santa! In this arcade ...
Jimmy Carter was on NPR...again on Monday. During the obligatory Bush bashing, Carter said something totally insane: "I can't think of a time in this country's 200 year history when we've been more isolated politically." Really? One can almost picture Dolly Madison, freshly transported from the ruins of the freshly destroyed White House due to the British in 1812, into 2004 hearing that and slapping Carter across the face. Is Carter really that ignorant of American history? H...
The chart below is a chart of CO2 emissions vs. Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Many in Europe falsely accuse George W. Bush of "killing" the Kyoto accords. In actuality, the Kyoto accords died in the United States in 1998. They don't have a chance to pass in the United States no matter who is President because the Kyoto accords are, basically, a joke. Now, if you're not familiar with the Kyoto accords (most Americans who argue for it probably have never looked at it) let me gi...
Well that sucked. Remaking Battlestar Galactica was always a risky proposition under ideal circumstances. But these circumstances weren't ideal due to a series of seemingly arbitrary changes that eliminated a lot of the good will of the original fans. By arbitrary I mean making Star Buck a girl. Making Boomer a girl. Hey, if you want to have girl power, put in new characters. The biggest arbitrary and I believe ultimately disastrous change was making the Cylons creations of the humans.&nb...
Yesterday we had a LAN party at the office and played Counterstrike all day. It had been about 3 years since I last played and my skills were definitely rusty. My "ownage" ability had definitely taken a few steps down. But it was still a blast. Though, it is always interesting to see a bunch of 30 somethings revert, just for an instant, to being a teen whenever someone makes a mistake (myself included). We had friendly fire on and I don't think there was anyone who didn't kill their own team...
A friend of mine sent me an email that showed the results of Google manipulation with regards to George W. Bush. In this case, a bunch of people go together and linked the words "miserable failure" to the biography of George W. Bush. So now if you go to Google and type in "Miserable Failure" the first link is George W. Bush. It's an amazingly petty thing to do and also very easy. I could do the same thing by using my access on several popular websites to link say Total Loser with http://www...
I uploaded two new suites today. Just putting the finishing touches on Object Desktop 2004 . The guys at the office have been working incredibly hard. Poor Kris has been burning the midnight oil trying to resolve a bunch of different things. For example, WindowBlinds 4.2 just doesn't work well yet on Windows 98/ME. The main problem is that those two OSes are total shit. We should have just said "No WB 4 on Win98/ME". But we promised to support it and we're suffering beca...
Paul got his Christmas Time Suite done. The frustrating thing is that WinCustomize is pokey due to the decrease in available hardware from the recent server crashes. This has affected JoeUser a bit too but not nearly to the level WC has been affected. So we've started a subscription drive to try to buy some new hardware. The goal is to get 500 people to buy premium WC subscriptions. It's a really good deal for all the stuff you get. But even if you didn't get that stuff, it's amazing how m...
If you read my article responding to Dvorak's column on blogging, you can tell I'm a bit annoyed with it. Having had a day to think about it and lots of email on the topic, I've narrowed down specifically why his column bugs me so much: It's based on a number of false premises. Specifically, he lumps all blogs together as if every person on the net is aiming to be a quasi-journalist. It's sloppy research which really bugs me when it's in the pages of PC Magazine. I like Dvorak. I kn...
I tell ya, I really wish I could go back exactly 2 weeks. Here's what I would do: a) Get all the WinCustomize.com skin libraries backed up. Get redundancy going on the sites c) Get THREE brand new machines to the server site. Right now, JoeUser.com, WinCustomize.com, Stardock.com, and all our other sites are running on TWO machines. Two PCs. It's ridiculous. But we've had two machines die in the past month. Not a shining time for Dell (nor their fault). One failed machine has ...
I often enjoy John Dvorak's columns. He's probably my favorite technical columnist out there. But at the same time, he is one of those people who makes rash predictions that are sometimes dead wrong. In fact, he's made so many bad predictions that he gave me the idea for a website - www.badpredictions.com that I registered almost 4 years ago. The idea was to let people submit entries that were either predictions already shown to be bad or ones likely to be bad: Who made a pred...
I write this from the airport. Thanks to my SprintPCS enabled cel phone, I'm on the Internet at around 384K (3G network). Being able to connect to the Internet anywhere makes traveling only slightly less painful. For one thing, airports are still an incredible hassle. For me, I don't travel except under great need. The logistic (and expense) requirements to move my carcas around has gotten pretty high over the years as a way of discouraging unnecessary travel. No matter how well I plan, it s...
Thoughts of the day... I updated my msstyles rant . It amazes me that someone out there would actually pay money to patch their uxtheme file. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't busted "companies" that make a profit selling cracks to the gullible. Tomorrow I'm speaking to U of M on software development and about the game industry. Tuesday I'm off to LA on business and won't be back until late Wednesday. I really hate traveling. I mean I can't understate it. I REALLY hate tr...