One of the sites I hang out on is called TreeHugger.com .  People who know me in person know that I’m pretty into helping the environment.  However, I just don’t find the evidence of humans materially affecting the climate to be persuasive. Most of the discussions are about things like making your home more energy efficient or how to improve your local environment. But every now and then, you get a global warming discussion and the militancy of the global warming advocates c...

The Elemental team having a night out. 

As some of you know, the Elemental Beta 0 got nixed due to us needing to throw developers onto Demigod to help GPG and Raknet with the online experience.  The team is starting to migrate back and we’re all glad to be back on Elemental but we did lose some time. But we are still pushing to have an Alpha build on June 25th to give out.  It’ll be cloth map only (so what you see in the above screenshot won’t be in the alpha series and the betas will look a lot better than what...

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2009/05/dealergate-statistical-evidence-that.html Evidence is mounting that the Obama administration is closing Chrysler dealerships based on whether or not they donated to Republicans or not.

As some of you know, we had to assign quite a few members of the Elemental team to help with Demigod after it was released.  Most of them are back on Elemental but a couple of our developers are still attached to Demigod to refine the multiplayer system in that game.  It’s been particularly challenging since initially there was virtually no “Stardock code” involved and now it’s thousands of lines.  So we have definitely “gotten involved”. The good news is that it will likel...

Wow. I mean, wow! San Diego county is demanding that people stop inviting friends over to their home for a bible study on the grounds that they do not have a permit. This is why, I don’t care where you stand on most political issues, I fear government power. A lot of people view politics as either liberal or conservative. I view it as the tug of war between those who push for anarchy and those who push for tyranny.  We live in the relatively comfortable area in-betwee...

A very interesting video on media bias. http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/The_Cost_of_Media_Bias/1736/6337/

Greeeeeeeetings! Well tonight we updated the new network system a couple of times. Micro updates via Impulse are totally the way to go.  Anyway, the proxy server system is working far better than anticipated. But to go any further with improving the networking, we need some changes that GPG is putting into v1.01 which I mentioned in a previous journal.  I don’t have a set day for that but I am hoping this next week. We already have the release candidate for it. I was ab...

I was reading a forum post about Braid somewhere where the person said they were going to wait until it came out on Steam because “they like all their games on Steam”.  The thing is, you can put all your games on Impulse with a simple drag and drop:   As a Steam user myself, I keep Left4Dead updated still with Steam but play it via loading up Impulse.

The other day I got my social security statement in where it shows how much I have made each year since I started working. The amounts are all over the place, especially after I made Stardock my career. There is something truly unique in the personality makeup of the entrepreneur that founds his (or her) own company from scratch to execute on some new idea and then builds it up to something that involves hiring employees and dealing with significant amounts of revenue. For one thing, I thi...

Anyone who reads enough of my posts can probably tell that I’m a kook. As I get older, I become more and more of a kook.  I have some theories as to why people in my position inevitably become more and more weird as they get older but that’s for another conversation. Former speaker Newt Gingrich has a fantastic article pointing out something that many people who follow this stuff are not just well aware of ut preparing for but is probably news to most Americans: There is a pretty good ...

Whether it be Obama’s poor handling of the British Prime Minister or his crazy remark that the US invented the automobile or even Obama’s aggressive plans to introduce ever more troops into Afghanistan (talk about a real quagmire opportunity) the question that keeps coming to my mind is: What if Bush had done the same thing? What would the reaction had been? Today’s example is Obama’s firing of the CEO of General Motors.  Think about that. The President of the United States just fired ...

I have downstairs an old Dell Dimension from 2003. It wasn’t state of the art, not even back then. It is running a Pentium IV running at 2.8Ghz.  My office machine, powered by a Core i7, is 15 times faster.  So the question is, is it possible to make this machine still useful today and if so, how much and how much work would it take? One of the things I always hear in support forums or critics of the PC is how expensive it is upgrade hardware.  So let’s take a look....

Using two benchmarking programs: Performance Test 6.1's CPU test   and HD Tach from Simple Software I measured performance I’ve started collecting historical benchmarks on my PCs. Turtle’s are laptops and Frogs are my desktops. Frog 2003: Decent Dell Dimension for its time.  Score 132. Turtle 2006 : My ThinkPad T60 which is what I took on business trips in 2006. Score 150. Turtle 2007 My ThinkPad T61 which is in the process of replacing the T60 once I fi...