If you spend enough time in a net community you will run into all kinds of people. If you run a net community you have to make some tough decisions very quickly about what to do with some of these kinds of people. Some people, let's face it, are just bad apples. If you met them in person they might be perfectly reasonable, even normal people. But on-line something happens to them. They become aggressive, totally devoid of empathy, manipulative, emotionally needy to the point of demanding attenti...

I just finished Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News by Tucker Carlson. It's a book that is...well Tucker Carlson's adventures in Cable News. Which isn't necessarily a good thing or what exactly I was hoping the book would be about. But let me start from the beginning... I first encountered Tucker Carlson on a late night TV show called "The Spin Room".  I immediately liked this guy as we share similar views on most issues. But more importantly tha...

Luvscure1 wrote an article that was very articulate even though I totally disagreed with it (which is why I featured it -- I wonder if Luvscure1 has anything to do with my favorite musical group, "The Cure" but that's a different subject). Amount of sympathy I have for people on welfare: 0. There are only two things you have to do in life to stay off of welfare statistically: Finish high school. Don't have any children until age 25. While it won't guarantee you never b...

Is penis size really that big of a problem? Each day, I get around 600 to 800 email. About 400 to 600 of it is spam that gets filtered. But I swear, about half of it is email providing solutions to penis size. Things brings up two questions: 1) Is there really that big of a market for penis enlargement? and 2) How did they know?  

So now that Panther (MacOS X 10.3) is out the Mac users are out again trying to convince "pee-cee" users to "Switch". The problem is, Mac advocates have no credibility at this point. They've spent it long ago. People don't like being lied to and the most vocal of Mac fanatics regularly and massively crossed the line between exuberance and outright dishonesty. Anyone who has debated in the OS wars long enough has seen what I'm talking about. Over the years argued that things like pre-emptive m...

So today we released a new product called DesktopX Professional. It's $499 and what it does is allow you to create relatively small applications incredibly quickly. Creating software has a significant overhead attached to it. If you wanted to, for example, to create this clock here with say Visual Studio.net how long would it take you to write it? Well, writing something that tells the time wouldn't be hard. But about the actual clock? As you can see, it has a shadow under it, the edges ...

When I first got my iMac I confess to having been quite disappointed. For one thing, MacOS X Jaguar was kind of crummy in my opinion. Mac users tend to be a fanatical lot and as a result tend to live in denial about the short comings of the Mac. It's like they have this unspoken rule not to publicly speak about all the problems Mac users deal with. Not being part of that cult, I had the audacity to point out the short comings here on JoeUser (will put together a list of links shortly to those...

So as I get into Panther (OS X 10.3) I'm increasingly annoyed at the $129 upgrade price. Not that Panther isn't a good upgrade but Apple has pretty much made it clear that it is a specialty shop. You're not just buying a computer, you are buying membership into an elite club. But for most people, cost matters. As a Mac and Windows user, my view is that while the Mac has some nice features, it s not nearly worth the cost involved. I mean come on, $129 for 10.3 from 10.2? That's ridiculous....

There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. It's true. Statistics can be used to pass off the most erroneous things as seemingly factual. Those of us who base our business plans on statistics have to be very careful not to let statistics mislead us. Over the years, I have made statistical analysis a key part of my core competency. I track all manner of statistics and have learned how to mush them together to form reasonably accurate conclusions. Here are 4 tables. May-01 ...

I'm having a lot of fun with making DesktopX objects. Tonight I made a couple of neat ones. I made an animated wallpaper that has snow falling on it. If you already have DesktopX installed you can get that here . It was amazingly easy to create. I just made one snow flake, added 3 lines of VB script and then cloned it a gazillion times with the mouse and voila, falling snow. My other fun for the night was this soccer game here. You can download that by going to this link . What I did i...

What is it with car manufacturers and REAR-wheel drive? What is particularly ironic about this is that the "Big 3" are located in Detroit Michigan. Which is roughly where I live. They must drive special, magical roads that I don't have access to. Maybe they're Stone-Cutters or something because the roads I drive on have snow on them quite a bit during the year which makes a rear-wheel drive car impractical. And yet...the cool cars I'm interested in are rear-wheel drive.  For ex...

There are basically two types of bloggers. And JoeUser.com is aimed at supporting both of them. Web Diarists The first type of blogger is the web diarist. This is a person who wants to be able to share his or her thoughts about their lives in a way that is recorded for the long haul. My wife fits more into this category. Years from now, she wants to be able to look back and be able to show that she did indeed think about things and do things besides change diapers and chase after our little...

If you have DesktopX you can now make use of this cool JoeUser reader object. Just sits on your desktop, updates every 10 minutes with the latest main pages blog entries. Get it here .

Is it me or is the Internet overall very slow today?

I'm going to write something more in depth once I get a better feel for Panther (10.3). I like my Mac. It's a fine machine. But Macs, since going to OS X (including 10.3) feel much more sluggish. I also find them very limited in how much you can change them in how they work. If Apple hasn't thought of it, you're not likely to be able to find a tool, freeware or otherwise, that will let you change its behavior. I also find the lack of freeware for it to be a major downside. I buy hundr...