This is what my Windows XP desktop looks like this month. Now, if you're new to customizing Windows, you may wonder why it looks so different. My day job at Stardock includes being Product Manager of something called Object Desktop. It's a desktop enhancement suite that allows you to customize the heck out of Windows. Corporations use it to create secure desktops or branded desktops. Individuals use it for all kinds of reasons including just making Windows look cooler or maybe more produc...
We played Rise of Nations this evening here on the LAN. Even with ideal conditions, multiplayer strategy games are almost more effort than they're worth. I think age is a major factor here. When I was in my 20s, I burned thousands of hours mucking around trying to get Total Annihilation or Warcraft 2 or C&C or whatever games going. But now at 32, I seem to have a lot less time or at least patience to throw away 20%+ of the "game day" due to various problems in multiplayer. Whether that be ...
Some months ago I started using some spam filters. My favorite has been SpamPal. Our mail server also has its own spam filter on there. They worked reasonably well. About 90% of the spam was caught by them. Which for me was significant because each day I get around 500 to 600 email of which around 300 to 400 is spam. Going through 600 email to find the 200 legitimate email was a major pain. It's still quite a pain even with the filters. But in the past month, more and more spam has been ge...
The new JoeUser.com system is still very new. There are still zillions of little buglets we're working through. Just today we fixed a problem with printing of articles as well as enhancing and then fixing the email article feature. There's still a lot of work to be done so please bear with us. But coming in a few weeks, people who create accounts (or already have accounts) will have the option of having their own blog. It'll be free to have your own blog here. And your blog won't be some wac...
Right now there's a lot of people who seem to think that because we haven't found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a major problem for the US. In fact, it's not. In the bigger picture, WMD was just a low hanging fruit excuse to do what needed to be done in Iraq. Those same people seem to forget that there were a lot of other low hanging fruit reasons to invade Iraq. One of the most obvious is, if he didn't have WMD, then Saddam was a fool to flout the UN resolutions and mess with the inspe...
In American politics, presidential candidates like Howard Dean stress the need of getting other countries to like us "again". Do you think that French candidates sweat whether the United States likes France? In fact, the United States has a 200+ year obsession with wanting other countries to like us or to accept us. The upper crusts of the American life have traditionally felt scorn and embarrassment at the "crass" culture of the United States. In the United States, the middle class has always ...
This was taken with the Hubble space telescope. As I mentioned last week , I bought the $300 ETX-70 hoping to see Mars up close. Anyone who is vaguely familiar with astronomy is probably laughing at the "typical newbie" naiveté when it comes to astronomy. The ETX-70 is a 2 inch or so telescope. 2 inches describes the diameter of the lens. Basically it just means that the dot in the sky is a slightly sharper bigger dot. If you want to have a shot at seeing anything of Mars, you...
I am notoriously bad about backing up my computer. And my main home machine went down this past week. The hard drive actually physically died. The motor went out or something. It's the machine that had all the baby pictures on it. Every picture that we had taken of our 2 children since they were born were on that computer. And the hard drive was dead. Luckily, I had been making backups thanks to those new portable USB drives that you can get at Best Buy or whatever, there's really no exc...
USA Today reviewed WindowBlinds 4 and it definitely made my day. Reviews usually make me cringe. That's because often times, when you're a small company, the reviewer cranks through the product in 10 minutes and whips up a review. Even when the review is favorable, it's often full of errors. But USA Today really nailed it. It was true vindication. You see, the problem with tech software is that people often don't realize just how dramatically it can improve over time. We still get people...
Steven Den Beste, who I've known since "the OS/2 days" took a short sebatical to gather his thoughts and has returned to blogging: http://denbeste.nu/ He has an interesting article this week about relative crime rates: I ran into this post over the weekend which talks about crime rates in the US. It talks about trends over time, and compares American crime rates to those reported from Europe. He is dealing with two basic issues: the belief held b...
My diabolical friend Norm lent me a series of comics called "Rising Stars". It's created by the same guy who made Babylon 5. On the NGs, we always refer to him as JMS. It's a fantastic series of comic books. In a nutshell, what happens is that in a small Illinois town, a flash of light occurs one evening. All the women in that town who were pregnant at the time (around 115) gave birth to children who would have super powers of various kinds. The series goes through their lives as chil...
My wife and I saw "Finding Nemo". Early on, the mother fish dies. This isn't a spoiler as the more we thought about it, the more we realize that mothers are pretty disposable in Disney films. Let's take a look: Move Fate of Mother Finding Nemo Mother dies in movie Aladdin Aladdin's mother dead at start. Then again, so is Aladdin's girlfriend's mother. Both fathers are alive. Bambi Mother killed late in the movie. Snow White ...
I must admit that it's pretty cool seeing the Galactic Civilizations community coming into its own. Besides there being various "empires" of users now with their own websites to discuss strategies and exploring the GalCiv universe, there's now a regular comic strip for it. Ah the Drengin and Torians. You can visit MetaJinx , the home page for all the various strips and other goodies.
The Canon Elura is quite fantastic so far but I've only had it a few days. It is tiny. Really tiny. The screenshot doesn't do it justice. It's not much bigger than my Little Elph camera that Canon makes (sheesh, you'd think I worked for Canon, I guess they're just on the ball). What I don't like about it is that it is a bit too complex. It's a little awkward to control since it's so small. My biggest gripe with it is that it is not easy to record video to the computer. I wa...
Got a lot of gadgets still to write up about. As fast as I type, it's not nearly fast enough to get everything that's in my head onto paper. I've got a neat headphone MP3 player to review, some noise canceling headphones to review, software goodies, and a few other things. Will get to them as soon as I can.