Every week I'm going to try to find cool things from around the web and share with you. On the computer, my favorite thing to do is skinning. Or more to the point, I really like to tweak up Windows XP to match my own insane way of doing things. The best way to do that is with Object Desktop . Not just because my employer makes it but because it really is the best way to do this sort of thing. Another good program to have is CursorXP. It has a freeware version if youw ant to give it a try at ...

According to this article at The Register , TabletPC sales are terrible. Which is not surprising at all to me.  What is surprising is that they are trying to blame Microsoft for the poor sales. The OEMS basically have 3 main reasons why TabletPCs aren't selling: Cost. Microsoft is over charging for the Tablet PCs version of Windows XP. Marketing. Microsoft isn't marketing Tablet PCs hard enough. Bundling. Microsoft isn't delivering compelling software to make Tablet PCs sta...

I've been having a fairly heated email discussion with regards to whether different races of humans have significant intelligence differences. On one side there are people who believe that natural selection over the past 50,000 years has shaped humans in different regions of the world to adapt to local environmental factors. The net result is that Europeans and Asians had environmental factors that called for higher intelligence.  I don't happen to agree with that. I do not think enough tim...

Man do I have a case of the blahs. I sometimes think I have the dullest life imaginable. But I think the real problem is that my job is my hobby and so when I get sick of that, what's left? I'm not sick of my job per se, just want a change of pace but things are so busy this past week. We've got DesktopX 2 going out the door on Monday. I gotta do the press release for that and then do the Object Desktop 2004 media guide. There's a bunch of documentation stuff. Clearly, this stuff ain't a hob...

Okay, so George and JR have been working really hard to clean up the underlying code for the site. For a few weeks, the site was feeling like it was crawling. Perosnally, I was running into two problems: 1) Overall sluggishness of pages coming up. 2) Page stalling. That is, I would get that top JoeUser yellow bar thingy and then the rest of the site would never come up. If any of you have experienced any of these things, please respond here letting us know if it's any better. We are...

My work machine stays up for weeks and often months at a time. In fact, the only time it gets rebooted is when our office loses power (which is too frequently, yea I should get a UPS). People are often shocked at this. How do I keep my system running for so long, especially given how hard I push it day in and day out while running all the major components of Object Desktop ? On Windows XP, it's actually pretty easy -- once you know what affects stability. It all starts with the task manag...

The release of iTunes has really sparked an on-line debate over the future direction of the music industry. You see it on websites, forums, news groups, heck my friends and I, who are not exactly music nuts have been debating it too. However, the pattern in discussion seems to mix business and sports.  Let me explain: In sports it's a win/lose proposition. One way will win, another way will lose.  In business, the goal is win/win. A winning strategy is merely one that generates more...

I'm so excited! So much cool stuff is going on! DesktopX 2 is nearly done, SkinStudio 4 and Icon Developer are coming, and WindowBlinds 4.2 is in the wings. WindowBlinds 4.2? WindowBlinds 4.2 is going to allow people to load up their own IE and Explorer toolbar icons along with replace those ugly progress dialog animations that have hung around since the Windows 95 era.  When you download a file or delete a file or copy something you get that old animation of files moving to a folder or ...

If you saw The Matrix Reloaded you undoubtedly noticed that the movie had some...issues. Well, the on-line humor site, The Editing Room, has a spoof screen play of the Matrix reloaded.  Read the full thing here . But here are a couple of highlights: INT.  WELL-LIT, NON-NOIR WHITE ROOM KEANU enters a white room, the walls of which are covered in monitors.  A chair spins around to reveal THE EXPLAINER.                         KEANU REEVES             Who are you?         ...

I've decided that I'm not an atheist. That doesn't mean I believe in "God" per se but being an atheist requires faith as well. We don't know how the universe got here. Oh, we have theories that go something like this: Around 14 billion years ago there was a gigantic explosion from a source that was theoretically smaller than an electron. As hard as it is to imagine, the universe isn't growing to fill up some "void" because there is no void. There is nothing else outside of our universe. One ...

My wife and I and friends played paint ball today. There we were in our camoflauge battling it out. What a work out. I realized something today. I am way WAY out of shape. My wife did remarkably well, especially considering it was her first time out there. How many guys are lucky enough to have a wife who will shoot at them with a gun? Er, nevermind.

Right now JoeUser just strikes me as being really slow. At first, I thought it was all the database stuff. But now, the home page is done at an HTM and it's still slow for me. The Joeuser header bar at the top shows up and sometimes it stalls on me there and I have to hit refresh. Seems CSS may not be so wonderful after all. Is anyone else running into this?

I've now added us to Blog Street. What I like about Blog Street is 1) It's a really good idea and 2) It really let's you see just how many blogs are out there.

"Oh we're getting quite close to cracking the secret to immortality" So we hear anyway from scientists who are exploring the secrets of anti-aging. Basically there are a handful of theories on what causes aging and how we might stop it. One of the more promising ones is gene therapy. Through gene therapy we can restore our tissues to the healthy adult level and hence delay or completely stop the onset of old age.  I have a number of books around here that talk about various str...

For fun, last night I started putting together my own iTunes like desktop.  I used Object Desktop . Object Desktop is a suite of several programs that allow you to totally customize Windows. There were 4 programs from Object Desktop that I used together to create this not counting ObjectDock (at the very top). First, I made use of ObjectBar. ObjectBar is one of the lesser known Object Desktop components. It currently suffers from a severe case of featuritis. Let me explain: ...