Having just finished watching Volume 2 of the Cartoon Network's Star Wars: Clone Wars series, I am just amazed at how well done this series has turned out to be. The stories are excellent. The pacing is outstanding. Terrific voice acting. And the action is everything we could have ever dreamed of. One can only imagine how fans would have reacted if the team putting these together had had a shot to do Episodes I and II. I suspect there would have been far less disappointment.&nb...
Greetings guys. We're in the current issue of Computer Games Magazine. But I saw that we got raided and lost some members which is a bit of a bummer. Comment here on what you would like to see and what's happening.
My second-grader son is having bully problems. He came to me tonight crying that this kid in school keeps punching him, sometimes in the head. I asked him if he had gone to the teacher about this yet? He said he had and that the teacher made the kid apologize for hitting him. But the next recess, the bully was back at it, hitting my son. He just didn't know what to do. So I told him: If he hits you again, you need to be prepared to beat the tar out of him. Don't start the fight. But...
Recently there's been an interesting discussion on WinCustomize.com about Stardock and PR. Simply put, Stardock's software is outstanding, but my outpsoken nature creates a lot of detractors for the company. If you think I'm in your face in politics or whatever here on JoeUser.com, you should see me in the "customization community". I'm very opinionated and vigorously defend our software. Long ago, when Stardock was just a few people, the "customization community" consisted of ju...
Our story so far.. JoeUser.com started out as my personal blog site. Like most blog sites, it only received a handful of visitors per day. One day, I decided it would be fun to turn it into a blog community. And to that end, the world class Stardock IT team put together an incredibly sophisticated set of technologies to help create the world's first "blogging community". Each user would have their own set of point, all articles would have points, blogs would have scoring. There'd be ...
The Senate's most famous brain donor, Democrat Barbara Boxer, publicly stated her belief that judges should require a super majority vote to be confirmed -- standing the constitution on its head. Her argument stemmed from her erroneous belief that once a judge is in, you can't get them out. That's actually not the case. In the early days of the republic, Presidents removed judges quite regularly for not following the constitution. If we got back to that, then we wouldn't have...
One day we noticed we were running out of space in our current building. We also decided that, as a software company, we should try to buy a building so that we would have something to borrow against if times were ever bad. Right now, times are really good. So now's the time to prepare for the future. So we find our dream building. Brand new. Just built. Great location. Ponds and nature stuff all around. Near the highway but not right on it. And we got it for a decent price.&nb...
Many game developers think the sky is falling when it comes to the direction of the game industry. They talk about how the new mega games having budgets of $10 million and how that is making publishers risk adverse which in turn stifles creativity and takes the romance ouf of game development. But is that really the case? Or is it more of a matter of game developers liking the "old days" where a small team could make "Game of the year" on a shoe-string budget. So is it really...
At this year's Game Developer's Conference developers are lamenting that the game industry has been warped beyond recognition: Wal-Mart drives development decisions now. When publishers minimise risk by kow-towing to the retailers, you have a serious problem. When every game has to either be a blockbuster or a student film, we got a real problem. For my end of the game business all of our efforts are going into reaching a mainstream audience who may well even not be interested in what we d...
I stumbled across a song called "Sugar" from Imperial Teen. I really like the song but I had a hard time telling what the lyrics were. But the mind, at least mine, fills in the blanks with its own lyrics. And so my mind filled in lyrics that turned it into a pretty romantic song. But it was bugging me, what are the lyrics to that song? Well it turns out these are: You can be white I can be brown again We have to go hide 'Cause your mother's in town again And I wanna ...
In this month's (April 2005) issue of Computer Games Magazine there is an article I've written about my 8 year old son, Alex. It's about his adventures as a Night Elf as part of our guild ("MythInc") on the Uther server in the game World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft isn't perfect, I know I have a long list of issues with the game. But it is, overall, a fantastic game. And for my son, it's a real thrill. Him and his younger brother (Ryan, 4) will pretend to be playing the ga...
I'm having one of those days today. I was supposed to give a class to our marketing & sales team today on how to effectively use Frontpage. So I brought in my trusty ThinkPad T40 laptop that I practically live on, fired it up, and got a blue screen saying that I had a corrupted volume. Luckily, it's NTFS so I can recover my data. But it's going to be a full reinstall on that computer. The other hassle is trying to get into the new building. Stardock has purchased a new building in P...
Once JoeUser goes through its speed/architecture overhaul we plan to offer premium accounts for users. One of the features will be photo albums. Here's an example of what they'll be like from what we are about to launch on WinCustomize.com: http://frogboy.wincustomize.com/photos.aspx The adding of photos is really the key though. It's incredibly slick -- a built in ActiveX control (soon to be Java) enables me to see thumbnails of images that are on my hard drives and select as many as...
American college graduates are making themselves increasingly vulnerable to outsourcing. I'm not the only one who thinks this. A top Intel executive has expressed this concern too . The problem is that American technology workers have a lethal combination upon graduation: A sense of entitlement and a lack of skills. The sense of entitlement is the from the belief that simply graduating with a degree in engineering, computer science, information technology, etc. somehow should ent...
As I watch my two little boys playing out in the snow, I feel a certainty at the core of my being of why I was born. Why I was put on this earth. To be a dad. Being a dad is what I'm best at. It is what I love doing and being more than anything else in the world (other than being a husband to my wife). There is nothing I'd rather be than the dad of my two sons.