Ever since college, I've had a long term goal of becoming a fiction author.  The problem is that while I can crank out words fast, their quality is oh so poor. I'm just not cut out for serious writing.  I can be mildly amusing in a pinch but drama, eck. During my senior year of college, I actually started on the first part of the "back story" of the main set of stories I've had in my head.  My wonderful aunt agreed to edit them. And so I handed in the first few chapters ...

On JoeUser classic no one could even comment on a blog.  No matter how obnoxious my opinion was on some topic, no one could come on and say "Hey, you may not like your Mac but at least it's not constantly infected by worm viruses!" or something like that.  Now, on the new JoeUser.com, you can.  On anonymous comments I do have the right to delete them (so no more "Go back to Russia!" comments <g>) but you don't have to actually create an account now to ...

Well what kind of blog doesn't have pictures and other personal stuff on it? Here's some pictures from this summer so far... Alex & Ryan at the zoo   Ditto Ryan turns 3

Mars reaches the closest point it's been to the Earth in 66,000 years on August 27. Rather impulsively, I went out and got a telescope. The results have not been very good thus far. I got the Meade ETX-70AT. From what I've read, this is a pretty good telescope. What's really nifty about it is that it comes with a little computer that lets me just select what I want to look and and it will rotate and change angle to point at what I want to see. This is pretty useful. So I put in Neptune or ...

XXX As you can see, the system is still under development and will be for the next few weeks. It'll be shaping up pretty quickly though I suspect. yyy Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor i

You know, the economy is in the dumper. Republicans blame Clinton and the Democrats. Democrats blame Republicans and Bush. Usually, recessions are hard to pin point. But this time around, it's pretty obvious who the blame lies with -- THE AMERICAN PEOPLE. Every American who bought stock in some idiotic dot-com idiocy helped contribute to the recession. Let's face it, as a collective, we earned this recession. Any country that puts together the capital to support a pet supply website to ...

For the past year I've been working from a terrific program called CityDesk. The way it works is that it has its own built in database and integrated editor. When you enter in a blog, it can generate HTML that you then upload to your site. Unfortunately, it's become more and more of a pain to access mapped network drives from remote and JoeUser.com is too busy to have it on a local machine. At the same time, blogging has become increasingly popular and I wanted to start putting together ...

“Can't we just get along?" If you hang out in a net community long enough, eventually you will have those who just don’t like you. The technical term I use for them are detractors and they fall into 3 categories:   Passive detractors. These are people who, if exposed to something you write, will tend to criticize it, even “unfairly.” Active detractors. These are people who will go out of their way to “stalk”  you on a particular site or news group to flame you. ...

A stinging but appropriate parody is available at National Review. It points out how different the world might be today had our leaders in 1941 behaved like our leaders today seem to behave.

Remember Microsoft Bob? Alex G, one of Stardock's graphics designers, took a break from working on Galactic Civilizations to create this modern rendition of Microsoft Bob using DesktopX.