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!
When we created JoeUser.com to be database driven we used the existing Stardock.net user database. What that meant is that everything was based by "Handles" (think CB radios). My handle on most skin sites was/is "Frogboy". That's actually more of an accident than intentional as I had intended Draginol to be my handle which is what I used here. But when writing articles on such issues, I've always felt a bit uncomfortable using a handle because it implies I have some pseudonymn. That I'm...
It's important to set goals for yourself. Pretty much everyone knows that and yet so few people actually sit down and articulate specific things they want to do. Every New Years people come out with "resolutions". Often times these resolutions are just not realistic. "Lose 25 pounds". That's easy to promise. But is it realistic? I'm a big believer in setting bunches of very easy goals that take only a little effort. I'd be the one to say "Lose 5 pounds" as a resolution for example. So here...
Out with the old, in with the new. Happy New Year!
There are basically two types of bloggers. And JoeUser.com is aimed at supporting both of them. Web Diarists The first type of blogger is the web diarist. This is a person who wants to be able to share his or her thoughts about their lives in a way that is recorded for the long haul. My wife fits more into this category. Years from now, she wants to be able to look back and be able to show that she did indeed think about things and do things besides change diapers and chase after our little...
They didn't have blogs back when I was 18. Back when I was 18 (14 years ago), I had a BBS but that wasn't the same. But I kept a journal. Unfortunately. A journal is the same as a diary. Except guys don't keep diaries so we call them journals. It's about marketing. This past week I went back and read my journal which took place between the age of 17 to 20. I remembered how melodramatic life seemed back then. But until I re-read my journal I had no idea just how bad it was. When you're 17...
If you have a blog already and are having trouble posting, let us know what your symptoms are. Post here.
Anyone who's written enough on-line over a long enough period of time knows that there are a lot of people out there who write before they think. This is particularly true on Blog Sites. My favorite blog, USS Clueless , doesn't allow any comments on his articles. He used to have a message board but eventually he grew weary of the idiocy there and disbanded that too. We have some advantages in that our IT staff can put together some interesting options for bloggers. Ultimately, JoeUs...
Not too excited to hear Mexicans treating our soccer team this way . Booing the US national anthem and yelling "Osama" as a soccer game in Mexico helps make the case that the US really needs to secure the border. It's not just that Mexican illegal immigrants aren't assimilating as well as other cultures have for economic reasons, they're not assimilating because unlike other immigrants, there's a considerable number of them quite hostile to the US. I have seen interviews with imm...