My wife and I are trying to have our cake and eat it too. A large house that relies largely on renewable energy.   The house is jammed full of both open and closed cell foam insulation.  Every wall and ceiling is filled with this stuff. Even with the house unfinished, it’s had a major effect on keeping the place warm this winter.  This turned out to be a pretty significant investment because of the space involved. But the long-term cost savings will be enormous ...

During my daily journey to Digg to see what’s cool and new I usually fail the temptation test of reading the comments on some of the political  articles. For example: http://m.digg.com/political_opinion/George_Will_Progressives_and_the_growing_dependency_agenda The most dugg comment (indicating that the Digg community found this comment to be insightful): Thanks for that myopic right wing rant-o-rama, George. Just because you have the money to afford private school...

I work at Stardock and those of you who follow my journals know I’m pretty opinionated (see “ Kudos to Good old Games ”, “ Happy about Steam ”, “Don’t blame the pirates”) .  So let me give my 2 cents on why the young studio, Ironclad Games is already so successful.  I’m not speaking for them. This is just my opinion on what makes a new studio successful. Who is Ironclad? The founders of Ironclad Games are industry veterans. They worked on Homeworld: Cataclysm and other pretty ...

As a kook, I’ve been into alternative power sources for a very long time.  Before being “green” became fashionable and dumb people started parroting what “the wise scientists [who happen to want grants] say” mantra, the kooks of the world have known an ugly truth about energy: Fossil fuels aren’t going away any time soon no matter what. If you look at the chart above, which I scanned from the December issue of Home Power Magazine (a magazine dedicated to alternative energy so...

With Winter getting along, my wife is insisting that I start taking the books I’ve recently read out of our bedroom and put them away downstairs. I won’t bore you with the books that weren’t good, below are the ones I highly recommend: The Little Black Book of Violence: What Every Young Man Needs to Know About Fighting Gridlock: Why We're Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology Transcend: Nine Steps to L...

  Ego isn’t the same as pride. Pride is the enemy. It is the destroyer. Pride is what makes people go against their own best interests.

By day I’m the happy CEO of Stardock.  At night, I’m either the sugar daddy or scurge of Neowin.net depending on who you talk to. I’ve been an administrator on the site for some years and its amazingly talented founder and President, Steven Parker (Neobond) has led the Neowin development team to create the latest incarnation of the site code-named Ignition. I must say, I’m incredibly impressed with the work they’ve done. If you’re not familiar with Neowin, check it out. It’s a great ...

Today marked week 4 of my pound a week diet. I started at 180 and this week I weighed in at 175.8 pounds.  I’m definitely not an over-achiever. I find it easier to lower my calories than I do exercising.  When I get home from work, I’m tired. I don’t want to work out. And I’m too lazy to get up early enough to go running.  I do manage to get some working out in during the week but no where near what I had planned to do. Probably the best thing I’ve done is stop drin...

Now that I can stream movies in HD, I just don’t have it in me to go out and go to Blockbuster anymore. I can’t find Gran Turino on Zune (xbox360) or comcast so I’ll just go without it.  I’m just that damn lazy now.

campaign finance “reform” healthcare “reform”

Did you watch the most recent “This Week” on ABC? You get a real idea of the bankruptcy of the political left through the dishonesty and pettiness of its advocates.   http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=9585338

What is the best way to have a civil online community? There are lots of opinions on this.  My position has always been to eliminate toxic users as quickly as possible. Ban them. Debating a topic: Good. Personalizing the debate: Getting onto thin ice.  Attacking people in the debate: Over the line. Over on Neowin.net, we’ve been trying to find ways to clean up the forums. News comments and forum posts there are pretty rough and much of that is, I bel...

Discussion I had on Treehugger.com:   We all need to make money, that's a given in this modern day and age. The issue greens have with "capitalism" is that it is done almost completely devoid of conscience and consideration for the long term outcomes. ("This asthma medicine may help control your asthma symptoms that have not been brought under control by existing medications.... this medication may increase your risk of death from asthma.&qu...

So much going on this year. 2010 is THE year. 2009…ugh. For our family, 2009 was awful.  My wife’s closest friend since childhood died of cancer. It is something that we are still coming to terms with. Few people have close friends from the time they’re small children all the way through their adult lives consistently.  And professionally 2009 was rough. Demigod’s launch was a very difficult time.  When it came out, the network libraries we had licensed just didn...