The Political Machine (the game) was released this past August and it sold quite well. It was published by Ubi Soft at retail and distributed electronically via TotalGaming.net. But as a money maker, it was so-so. That's because a game that retails for $20 that has only a few month life span is going to have a hard time making back its investment. Luckily, The Political Machine made its money back. But even if it hadn't made its money back, it was worth doing. In fact, it wo...
Here's the dirty little secret I've picked up about successful business people - they have mastered the art of not just figuring out what the most important tasks are but, and this is key, figuring out which needed tasks to drop off. I don't claim to be a paragon of business. But I am coming to understand that each day, there are things that need to get done that I simply cannot get done. I haven't fully made the transition to doing this optimally as I still end up trying to do more things th...
My car's lease is almost up so I have to think about getting a new one. I currently have a 2003 Bonnaville. It's a pretty good car actually. Cost around $35,000 back in 2003. But now it's time for a new one? Any suggestions? Here are the specs: (1) Needs to be front-wheel or all-wheel drive. (2) I prefer American made cars. (3) Prefer a head's up display (4) Prefer but don't require 4-door vehicle. (5) Needs ot have built in nice GPS type unit. (6) Needs to have enough horse pow...
JMS, the creator of Babylon 5 along with a fantastic writer of many graphic novels (including the long delayed "Rising Stars..ahem..) has put his two sents on the recent cancelation of Star Trek: Enterprise and his thoughts on what Paramount needs to do.. I'm sending this to both the B5 folks reading this and any Trek fans looking on. Bryce Zabel (recently the head of the Television Academy and creator/executive producer of Dark Skies) and I share one thing in common. We are both lon...
Running an Internet based business is vastly different than running a traditional bricks and mortar based company. This is particularly true if you are running and Internet based business that deals with end users since, at that point, you are running the Internet equivalent of a retail store. The first reason it is different has to do with a term we call "conversion rate". The conversion rate of a traditional store varies but is typically around 5%. That is, if 20 people visit yo...
The thing about Valentine's day is that you can appreciate the love of your life. My wife is really wonderful. She's my best friend and the mother of our two children. She has an almost infinite level of patience and has a quantity kindness that I've never encountered in another human being. If she has only faults, it would only be in her questionable taste in spouses. I am very glad that I met her and that she is part of my life. We've been together 13 years now and each day I wak...
..I'm in a ranting mood...stand back! Over the years I've noticed a pretty consistent thing - there are people who really really have a problem with the concept of people making a living selling software. As a result, some of these people make it their mission to go out and harass people (like me) who make a living selling software. One example came up today. I am a news moderator on the popular tech news site Neowin.net . I think it's a fantastic site with an incredible st...
At 4PM EST (which is about 35 minutes from now) we will be having a Stardock conference on #stardock on the IRC server irc.stardock.com. Users can go into the #questions channel to ask questions and then those questions will be relayed over to #stardock where Stardock's development team will be answering them. The topics of discussion are primarily DesktopX 3, DesktopX 3 Pro, and Multiplicity. But other topics are open for discussion as well. Hope to see you there!
So I'm now at 4 days and 10 hours of play time (type "/played" in the prompt and you can find out how much time you've played). Stormy Waters, the highest level player in our guild, is level 56 and has put in 18 days in. This is literally how many hours one has spent in the game. So you can get an idea of the time investment involved to get high up. ; and how addictive the game is.
If you've ever thought of getting a master's degree in Education or Educational Technology via on-line courses I recently heard from a friend that CMU has some excellent programs for doing that. CMU is one of the top schools in the country for degrees (particularly Masters degrees) in education.
Issue Conservative Liberal Abortion X Environment X Religion X Military X Taxes X Social Services X I'm a conservative on the key issues of the day. Taxes, Military Policy, and Social Services. But I'm liberal on many too. Pro-Choice, Pro-Environmental policy, Not religious. I also support civil unions for gay couples (though not marriage). Don't get m...
Empathy is a strange thing. Someone with empathy can read in a lot from someone from what they write on an IRC channel. But someone short in empathy can meet someone, read what they write, and still not have any idea what makes that person tick. Learning you lack empathy is an important first step to trying to develop it. I know because for most of my life, I lacked empathy. Developing empathy is critical to success in business. It's absolutely critical in managing a company and i...
The said that Afghanistan would be a quagmire. They were wrong. They said that invading Iraq would cause an "unrelenting wave of terrorists attacks on US soil" they were wrong. They said that an invasion of Iraq would cost "half a million civilian deaths" they were wrong. And most recently that the US was losing the hearts and minds of Iraqis. That turn-out in the the Iraqi election would be low because people didn't have faith in the system. And they were wrong again. 72...
I wrote in this article about my fear that the Democrats were going to drive themselves to extinction due to its inability to encourage its extremists to find a different party to belong to. A new user called JTurnas responded: Now for some advice to you Draginol. Anyone running a business shouldn't post public political opinions. Its only going to cost you big in sales. Those liberals have credit cards, just like the moderates, its only logical they will take their money elsewhere. Yo...
Glenn Reynolds had a very interesting discussion with regards to how the Democrats should deal with their kooks: You rightly point out that we liberals must do our best to shout down, disassociate ourselves, do everything we can to make ourselves no longer the party of Michael Moore, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, et al. And as you noted, the Right does do a better job of quieting its 'idiotarians'. The only problem is, they essentially do it with the "bribes and promises" approach. Jerr...