What an awful day it was today. It started well. One of our key developers is leaving to go to Microsoft whic is a bummer but we had a last day lunch and movie (saw Van Helsing which was pretty good). Then it all went down hill. Various technical problems - Stardock Central messing up, can't make news items via our internal news syndication system, and other minor mishaps. And then the contract negotations with publishers on one of our upcoming games. I'm faced with some unpleasant choices...

We were in the Detroit News today.  The article was for The Political Machine mostly but was ultimately a profile on our company. If you're interested in it, you can read it here: Detroit News Stardock article

My wife and I had a great time last night. One of my co-workers got married and it was a great night. They had a terrific reception with good music, dancing, etc. My wife and I boogied all night together. But the guy who got hitched, he's our lead cartoonist on The Political Machine. We realized yesterday that we don't have an image of Dick Cheney in the game. During the reception, they were asking people to sing a song to get them to kiss. Here's what I came up with: (sung to "Close to yo...

It's now time for another episode of: WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER PUT YOUR IMAGE ON THE INTERNET. (see link below)

Tonight I'll be on CNBC's "Bullseye" show.  It's on at 6pm EST (my segment will be on around 6:30).  I'll be driving into Detroit for the satellite hook up.  With the political season ramping up, it's going to be pretty exciting to see how things turn out. Things are so close and could go either way. Perfect timing for the game.  The Political Machine is a strategy game in which players take on the role of a campaign manager of a US presidential candidate. &...

I was on NPR this afternoon doing an interview with regards to The Political Machine ( www.politicalmachine.com ). As soon as they have the RealAudio archive up I'll post a link.

I often enjoy John Dvorak's columns. He's probably my favorite technical columnist out there.  But at the same time, he is one of those people who makes rash predictions that are sometimes dead wrong.  In fact, he's made so many bad predictions that he gave me the idea for a website - www.badpredictions.com that I registered almost 4 years ago.  The idea was to let people submit entries that were either predictions already shown to be bad or ones likely to be bad: Who made a pred...

Just got back from South Padre Island. Lots of run. The kids loved the ocean. We all got a little sun burned. Only downer is that my right ear is totally plugged. Went to the doctor while there and got a prescription...not that it helped any since the pathetic pharmacies there didn't have the anti-biotics.  I really like South Padre island though. The people are nice and it's a fun vacation but I would hate to live there. It's like traveling back to the 70s in terms of technologies and r...

JoeUser.com is unique in the sense that it is, the first (and to my knowledge) only blog site that integrates all the blogs together into a single meta blog community. There are plenty of free blog sites out there. BlogSpot for example is vastly more popular than JoeUser.com is and in all likelyhood ever will be. But JoeUser bloggers get a few key advantages: Every site promotes every other active site/article/post.   The blogger on Blogspot or some other blog is not li...

As JoeUser.com heads towards being officially launched (probably in late August) I wanted to give you a preview of what's going on: Blog Navigator and Blog Navigator Pro.   We're going to make Blog Navigator Freeware and then create a Blog Navigator Pro (anyone who bought the regular one will automatically get the Pro version).  Blog Navigator Pro. This program has all the features of Blog Navigator plus some extras (more search capabilities for example) along with the ability...

I spent a lot of the day getting DesktopX 2.2 objects put together and testing.  I'm trying to get DesktopX to respect it deserves. Here it is, the world's best, most flexible, lowest overhead, fastest, easiest to use "widget" creation application and yet there's still people anxious for Konfabulator for Windows or using Avedesk (which is nice) or Samurize or something else. So I've started assigning more engineers into creating content for it so that its coolness is more apparent....

Right Wing News ( www.rightwingnews.com ), has an interesting discussion about building up your blog's popularity.  I feel a lot better having read it because I thought I was the only one who felt some of the frustrations he's felt.   JoeUser.com hasn't "officially" launched yet. We're still technically in beta (i.e. we haven't done any promotion).  Our Alexa ranking is around 25,000. Sometimes it shoots up when something written here gets particular attention bu...

Frankly, I'm just astounded at some of the bickering and pettiness I see in the forums. There are hundreds of regulars but a few dozen have coalesqed into cliques. I personally don't get into on-line cliques. But I don't think there's anything inherently bad about them. The Internet should be whatever you make of it. As long as you're not hurting anyone, knock yourself out. Meet friends, talk to them, etc. I only worry about cliques when they start to resemble gangs. And I see a couple "ri...

So we went up to Higgins Lake.  Had a good time there, particularly thanks to visiting with family there.  My family isn't very large, there's not many of us. Since college, I haven't been very good at staying in touch with my family. Which is pretty lame on my part because there aren't that many people to stay in touch with. But when my sons came along and work started to be a little less crazy, I decided it was time to start trying to provide them the sort of rich experienc...

If you spend enough time in a net community you will run into all kinds of people. If you run a net community you have to make some tough decisions very quickly about what to do with some of these kinds of people. Some people, let's face it, are just bad apples. If you met them in person they might be perfectly reasonable, even normal people. But on-line something happens to them. They become aggressive, totally devoid of empathy, manipulative, emotionally needy to the point of demanding attenti...