What a week it's been.  We have guests from Europe this week and I'm one of those guys who normally sleeps in until 10am.  But i've been having to get up at 8:30am. Yea yea I know poor baby. But I'm tired.. And now I'm hungry..

What is it with people who throw a fit and delete all their stuff in a given on-line community? Who do they think they're punishing? Just themselves. It's a classic "cut your nose to spite your face" scenario. Happens on WinCustomize.com all the time. Some skinner will get mad because some guy ticked them off in the forums and so they go and delete all their stuff in a huff.  Typically, a few weeks later, they come back and ask us to restore their stuff for them. The same thing happen...

Quite regularly we get submitted a design document or prototype of some game or software idea or web concept from some ambitious young  person.  The proposal is usually quite vague but they insist it's a revolutionary idea that, once made, will make millions of dollars. They are quite..generous as well in their proposal offering to split the proceeds that their revolutionary product would make 50/50.  Others generously offer to sell us the concept for a reasonable cost.  "...

If you haven't used Feedster, it's worth checking out for searching blogs. www.feedster.com .   No Need to Click Here - I'm just claiming my feed at Feedster

For those of you who are looking for an attorney in Michigan, we use Jerry Bagazinski who acts as our general counsel. He practice areas are estate planning, real estate, business planning, probate, powers of attorney, and business law. If you ever need to contact him his email address is gabpc@aol.com  or call him at 734-522-2247. Tell him we sent ya.

Another little treasure I found, this one from 2001 talks about how OS advocacy has limitations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardock That's the entry for Stardock. It's not just pretty dead on but it's startling accurate. In fact, I don't understand how they were able to make it this accurate. The amount of time and effort just for gathering this data must have been significant. Really, pretty amazing.

So let's put all recriminations aside about what Clinton did or Bush did.  What should be done, if anything, about North Korea?

JoeUser is not just slow but it's been flakey lately. It's been very frustrating for me to deal with that. The site's traffic has increased considerably in just the past few months. From 120,000 visitors in November to 160,000 already in February. But that's not what's causing the problem. It's WinCustomize which shares the same databases as JoeUser.com. Its traffic has climbed from 10.2 MILLION visitors in November to almost 17 MILLION so far this month in 24 days. But it's not like t...

Every few months a firestorm wages on WinCustomize.com. The site hosts thousands of pieces of artwork in the form of skins, themes, icons, wallpaper, etc. And some people can give a star rating to a submission (1 through 5 starS) On the one hand, often times the skinners (the ones who create the content) have a problem with the whole rating thing. Usually skinners whose works get below 3 stars. Solutions such as eliminating anonymous ratings have been proposed over the years.  Of cour...

iTrip is a gadget that connects fairly seamlessly to your iPod. What it does is allow you to play your iPod music on an FM radio.  You set the station with your iPod and if you tune in your radio (that is within several feet) to that station you can listen to what's on your iPod. I've used a number of these things in the past and this is by far the best one (the Belkin TuneCast II, for instance is total crap). ITrip is ideally suited for the iPod because a) It connec...

In the "skinning" world (for those of you not familiar with skinning, it's a large community of power users and techies who enjoy customizing their PC software and operating systems in unique ways) there are occasionals complaints that there are too many Stardock "groupies" or "fanboys" who defend everything Stardock does. Hah. Stardock may be "the Blizzard of skinning" but there is no substitute for Blizzard but Blizzard when it comes to having fanboys. I'm friends with people at Blizzard...

This week Blizzard updated its popular massively multplayer RPG game, World of Warcraft. The main changes was a "bug fix" that dramatically decreased the amount of damage the Paladin class was capable of doing.  The change occurred in how the "Seal of the Crusader" is handled. Previously it allowed the Paladin to swing faster AND keep doing the damage he would normally do with each swing.  Now, it's been changed so that the Paladin swings faster but each hit does less damage (so th...

If you're interested in seeing how Galactic Civilizations II is progressing, check out the Galactic Civilizations II developer journals pages. It'll give you a week by week outline of what's going on and where things are going.

Irrational Games, the developers of the hit "Freedom Force" go through their experiences with the development of Freedom Force along with their trials and tribulations over how best to get its sequel, Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich into the hands of gamers. Check it out!