So here I am, back in my office. I like my job but wow, I really preferred to be home. Had a great vacation though.  Finished Knights of the Old Republic II.  Pretty disappointed with the rushed ending and the plot lines that didn't make any sense at all to me.  The first one was magnificient. The new one is absurd and has gaping holes in its plot. Played quite a bit of World of Warcraft.  I'm Draginol on the Uther server.  Trying to come up with a good tabard for ...

If it seems like JoeUser.com hasn't been getting much loving from Stardock lately, it's because it hasn't.  It's not that we don't love all of you and JoeUser.com, it's just that we only have so many developers and so little time to put into each project. And while JoeUser.com does attract many thousands of users each week, WinCustomize.com attracts almost 4 million each week. And WinCustomize.com had been severely negletected for so long. This month, all our sites will be making a cr...

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...

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...

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..

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...

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

Here's some interesting links I came across while surfing tonight: Military use of nanotech: http://crnano.typepad.com/crnblog/2005/03/military_uses_o.html Slashdot review of a game design book: http://books.slashdot.org/books/05/03/29/1926206.shtml?tid=206&tid=6&tid=10 Return of the Mac: http://paulgraham.com/mac.html Revenge of the Sith Comic book covers: http://www.theforce.net/episode3/story/Revenge_of_the_Sith_Comic_Book_Covers_90657.asp Today's Best of the W...

The new JoeUser.com system is still very new. There are still zillions of little buglets we're working through. Just today we fixed a problem with printing of articles as well as enhancing and then fixing the email article feature. There's still a lot of work to be done so please bear with us. But coming in a few weeks, people who create accounts (or already have accounts) will have the option of having their own blog. It'll be free to have your own blog here. And your blog won't be some wac...

I've been trying to talk my wife out of living in Michigan for something like a gagillion years.  Not that Michigan is awful. It's not.  It has beautiful Spring and Falls and summers are quite pleasant.  And our part of Michigan (south eastern), is no more north than Northern California.  On the other hand, Michigan has terrible roads.  Sure, there's no traffic compared to say New York or California but they're full of pot-holes.  The excuse is that trucks in Mi...

One of the coolest features (I think) of Stardock.net sites are the referral links. Some sites have "track back" but it's a long, painful, manual process.  On Stardock.net sites like JoeUser or WinCustomize or GalCiv.com ro whatever, if you link to a particular article, you can see your link and how many people came to it from your link via referrals. It's very cool.

So you're a kid. La-di-la-la.  One day you're 19. At college. Trying to get through your classes. And then one day you wake up and you're 33, married with two children. The good news: Your acne cleared up.  The bad news, your hair may be thinning. The zits are gone, but now I swear my hair is thinning. I'm not sure, it used to be too painful to comb it. But I swear it was thicker before! I hear that propecia can fix it but on the one hand, I'm married. Who gives a crap how I look? ...

For those of you interested in what the new office looks like here's a video I took (in .WMV format) with my digital camera.  The first part is muted (too windy) but I narrate a bit once inside.

Well tomorrow is my birthday. Which means, naturally, my family has come down with a virus.  I've finished tucking them all in and can now surf the net a bit before getting some late night work done. Linda Folely demonstrates why people don't trust the media anymore even if her demonstration is unintentional. Democrats are mad at Karl Rove  for pointing out a stereo-type between the left and the right when it's come to the war on terror. The American Right: "Let's go get the g...

Every registered user and every blog has points associated with it. These points are added together set up the different ranks of users and blogs on this site. Why have a point system at all? What motivated me to set this up was that I wanted to set up a medium in which people could write articles and that the popularity of that article would be based, at least in party, on merit. All too often, what gets read on the Internet is purely a matter of luck - some very popular website links to so...