And so on this Christmas eve I share with you all my own narrow judgmental take on how life should be. Today's topic, lame people on Christmas. Are you a Christmas lamer? Here are the signs: 10) You didn't send Christmas cards out this year. 9) You did send Christmas cards out but as emails. 8) You justified 9 or 10 because you were "so busy" this year (as opposed to everyone else) 7) Your "Christmas shopping" consisted of going to one big store (ala Target or Walmart or something...
So there I am, at the dentist to get my tooth looked at (it was fine) when the dentist says to me "I heard you decided not to have your son's cavity filled." "Yes," I said. "I don't see the point in putting my 8 year old son through the drill to deal with a cavity that is on a baby tooth." "Still you should really make sure he gets taken care of, your son needs to have that filled." he responded. Rather than debate it I responded, "Hey look, if social services can't get me to lis...
Isn't one of the selling points of console games versus PC games that the console games are less buggy? That hasn't been my experience so far and right now, I'm pretty exasperated by it. I'm enjoying the new Knights of the Old Republic game. I played the first one on my PC and loved it so much that I bought an Xbox pretty much to get this game. But it's glitchy. Tonight I hit the biggest glitch yet, a game ending one. I escaped from the the planet Telos and as it loaded up the next screen...
Only a few more days left until Christmas vacation! My wife and I and sons (Alex pictured here) are pretty excited about the whole thing. We're really excited to visit with friends and family during the holidays. I've got copies of Knights of the Old Republic, Pirates, and World of Warcraft to keep me busy. My son Alex has a 7th level character running around WoW these days too. No matter where you are though, we hope you have a Merry Christmas. Have a great time these next coup...
In my Christmas letter I talked about liberal Democrats fleeing to Canada to escape "Jesus Land". I've talked to some family members and friends who weren't familiar with this reference. So for those of them that visit my blog, here's what I was referring to: Shortly after the election a bunch of far left wing bloggers and journalists started claiming that the only reason why Bush won is because the "Jesus Freaks" came out in force to vote for Bush. And so in their view we ha...
As online-game companies court new and wider audiences, many are running into an old problem: "griefers," a small but seemingly irradicable set of players who want nothing more than to murder, loot and otherwise frustrate the heck out of everyone else. Social miscreants can do more than ruin the game for better-behaved competitors. They can hurt game companies' bottom line by driving away customers and burning up support lines. Problems related to grief players often account for 25 percent or m...
Often times it's much easier to chat voice than chat with the keyboard. To that end there is a program called Ventrilo. We have a server that we put up a long time ago that you are free to make use of. My friend Alex has a guild called Digital Marines (DIM). I let them use the ventrilo server as well and they're a good bunch of guys. First you'll need to download the Ventrilo client: [Download Here] Once you have it installed, it will need to point to a server: cs.stard...
The last couple weeks have been very rough at work. I've been doing more hours than I care to. Last week I did approximately 77 hours. This week I'll probably do another 60. Had a major negotiation with a major publisher to license their trademark fall apart today. Months of effort wasted. The terms had been agreed on but the lawyers killed it. Every little detail had to be micro-managed, signed off on by every party, to a scale that was simply unmanageable. It would hav...
You can't choose to have faith in something. You either have faith or you don't. And when it comes to most religious issues the most faith I can manage to muster is the faith that there may be some greater being, some higher power that ultimately created the universe. Beyond that, my faith is lacking. My friends who have faith cannot understand this aspect of myself anymore than I can understand their ability to have faith in their particular religious choice. It's beyond me. I si...
When I get into a political debate with friends or family that are liberal in their political views, at some point one of them will say "Well yea, you're conservative because you're one of the ones benefiting most from Bush's tax cuts." I'm 33. So for most of my life I wasn't well off. Yet for as long as I've even contemplated what the role of government should be in our lives as well as what people should do for themselves versus what the "community" should do for them I've had conservative ...
We're up to 15 members now over on the Uther server for Myth Inc. Which means it's time to start thinking about Guild Tabards. What would you like to see?
How do you define success? Different people define it different ways of course. But most of the time, people in conversation qualify the term success. They say things like "He is very successful in business" or "She has a successful marriage". So what does success mean in the generic sense? What does it mean when someone says John is successful? Here's my definition: A successful person is one who is able to achieve a level of material and emotional comfort in which their ...
Holy cow what a week it's been. First off, sorry JoeUser.com has been so buggy this week. We launched the new WinCustomize.com this week and it's using all new ASP.NET technology and we had some bugs in it that caused it to overwhelm the server. It's still pretty intensve but it's getting much better. But the result was that it was bringing JoeUser.com to its knees. Monday and Tuesday I spent in New York. Got home Wednesday morning (last flight out). Yesterday I ...
Okay, it's going on 3am and my brain is starting to not function which means it's time to go home. I can say that DesktopX 2.4's bundled widgets, objects, and themes are going to rock. We included a cool corporate desktop template in there and we are including a lot more interesting DesktopX objects that people can use to build their desktop up with. We aren't including quite as many widgets but instead are trying to include better widgets. That said, I did run into quit...
I get a lot of email. I mean I really get a lot of email. Approximately 1,500 email per day. Of that 1,500 about 1000 of it is spam (or at least filtered out as spam). Of the remaining 500, about 200 of it is spam that didn't get caught leaving 300. Of that 300 about half of it (200) I either don't need to respond to or can optionally respond to. That leaves around 100 email per day that needs to be responded to. At 3 minutes on average per email, that would be 5 h...