My wife and I and friends played paint ball today. There we were in our camoflauge battling it out. What a work out. I realized something today. I am way WAY out of shape. My wife did remarkably well, especially considering it was her first time out there. How many guys are lucky enough to have a wife who will shoot at them with a gun? Er, nevermind.
Little discussed feature about the IBM Thinkpad T40. The Fn-space bar combo will instantly switch the resolution to a the next lower one. this is great when you are browsing the web and want the text nice and big. Just one of the many handy features that makes the Thinkpads rule.
I'm so far behind on so many things. I also have a bunch of topics to cover. I have a fun article about Hydrogen fuel cells and the problems they have. Short answer: We're not going to have hydrogen fuel cells any time soon. Sorry. The Matrix Revolutions was spectacularly crappy. Shockingly bad. I have two huge projects in front of me to get working on that is on top of all our existing projects. One on the business unit and the other for the games unit. I need to find us a bigger buildin...
Is it me or is the Internet overall very slow today?
Want to get your blog more popular? First, visit this article that has some good tips: http://www.rightwingnews.com/category.php?ent=1027 Next, link to other like minded blogs. This is important. Get them to exchange links with you. What's nice about JoeUser is that referrals are tracked so you can actually see who your best referrals are. Look at the bottom right in the lighter gray area. That's where links to your blog are coming from. Now, to add links to your personal blog click o...
...and the #1 reason why Stardock is so successful: Because everyone thinks desktop enhancements are a tiny niche market. When I try to convince the press to cover our software, I am often met with "Do people really use this stuff?" By "stuff" they mean desktop enhancements. Do people really want to change the way Windows looks and feels? Surely, it's just a tiny group of geeks who do this right? Right?? In actuality, desktop enhancements are pretty huge. They jus...
I write this from the airport. Thanks to my SprintPCS enabled cel phone, I'm on the Internet at around 384K (3G network). Being able to connect to the Internet anywhere makes traveling only slightly less painful. For one thing, airports are still an incredible hassle. For me, I don't travel except under great need. The logistic (and expense) requirements to move my carcas around has gotten pretty high over the years as a way of discouraging unnecessary travel. No matter how well I plan, it s...
If you read my article responding to Dvorak's column on blogging, you can tell I'm a bit annoyed with it. Having had a day to think about it and lots of email on the topic, I've narrowed down specifically why his column bugs me so much: It's based on a number of false premises. Specifically, he lumps all blogs together as if every person on the net is aiming to be a quasi-journalist. It's sloppy research which really bugs me when it's in the pages of PC Magazine. I like Dvorak. I kn...
Thoughts of the day... I updated my msstyles rant . It amazes me that someone out there would actually pay money to patch their uxtheme file. I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't busted "companies" that make a profit selling cracks to the gullible. Tomorrow I'm speaking to U of M on software development and about the game industry. Tuesday I'm off to LA on business and won't be back until late Wednesday. I really hate traveling. I mean I can't understate it. I REALLY hate tr...
Every month or so I go through a day or two of the blahs. Where I just feel...down. That's where I am now. That feeling of hopelessness. It always passes. I'll exercise or find something to keep me busy. Though ironically, our main skin library hard drive died yesterday at WinCustomize.com and that has definitely not helped matters. Trying to restore all that data is going to be a pain. Luckily, I work with really smart, talented and hard working people who are taking care of that stuff. B...
I tell ya, I really wish I could go back exactly 2 weeks. Here's what I would do: a) Get all the WinCustomize.com skin libraries backed up. Get redundancy going on the sites c) Get THREE brand new machines to the server site. Right now, JoeUser.com, WinCustomize.com, Stardock.com, and all our other sites are running on TWO machines. Two PCs. It's ridiculous. But we've had two machines die in the past month. Not a shining time for Dell (nor their fault). One failed machine has ...
A friend of mine sent me an email that showed the results of Google manipulation with regards to George W. Bush. In this case, a bunch of people go together and linked the words "miserable failure" to the biography of George W. Bush. So now if you go to Google and type in "Miserable Failure" the first link is George W. Bush. It's an amazingly petty thing to do and also very easy. I could do the same thing by using my access on several popular websites to link say Total Loser with http://www...
Man, what a week it's been. It started well. Last week before Christmas and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King starting. But then things went down hill. One of our competitors on the desktop side, TGT Soft, apparently was feeling festive and decided to file a lawsuit. On Wednesday Stardock received a lawsuit from TGT Soft that was filed in Louisiana. It's largely about one of our programs, IconPackager. The world's first and most popular way to change all your icons on Wi...
If you've been coming to JoeUser for long, you've hopefully seen a gradual progression in the quality and features of the site. We've been heavily evaluating the various blog features and technologies out there. Some are really good. But some are just dumb. Here are some of my newbie view points on these issues. Feel free to comment and tell me where you agree or disagree. Good Blog Technologies RSS The Good: RSS is a standard that takes headlines from news sites (particularly blog sites...
No matter where you are, have a merry Christmas!