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...

We're trying to figure out a database issue that is related to JoeUser.com.  So we have been having to take JU down periodically in order to test potential solutions.

I suspect like many of you, I've been very frustrated with JoeUser's unreliability and downtime recently.  It's just one of the downsides of increasing popularity and not having the resources to address it. Last week, it really came to a head and we literlaly had to take the site down in ordre for any of our sites to stay up.  So while it was down, we started cleaning things up where we could.  We're still not happy where things rae but right now, we're up. I am really sorr...

Man do I have a case of the blahs. I sometimes think I have the dullest life imaginable. But I think the real problem is that my job is my hobby and so when I get sick of that, what's left? I'm not sick of my job per se, just want a change of pace but things are so busy this past week. We've got DesktopX 2 going out the door on Monday. I gotta do the press release for that and then do the Object Desktop 2004 media guide. There's a bunch of documentation stuff. Clearly, this stuff ain't a hob...

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 ...

Does JoeUser.com seem like it's faster? In the past week in the course of trying to fix the site, we (and by we I really mean T-Man and Alberto) have been working like madmen to optimize the site code to make it more efficient.  Hopefully, getting to articles and such feels a lot faster.  How does it feel to you? It should feel significantly faster so if it doesn't, let us know. Thanks!

In about 10 days we are going to do a points audit on the site.  Every time someone makes a comment, post, etc. they receive points for it. It's recorded in a log. I know, from casual inspection, that some people have far more points than their available # of comments and articles could possibly warrant.  Now I have a confession to make, I've been very competitive in my life and I've played the system my share of times. I haven't done so here since I'm the #1 user because I know...

The points system doesn't exist to promote fairness.  It doesn't exist to encourage competition.  It's not even designed to encourage bloggers to blog more. The points system is designed spefically to promote articles and bloggers that have already gained a readership.  It doesn't care what you write about.  It doesn't care whether you're a liberal or a conservative.  It doesn't care what color your skin is or what sex you are.  It simply designed to promote thos...