I am glad that people are actively following politics more these days.  However, I am somewhat concerned with the amount of passion that’s been directed towards it.

I enjoy a good political debate but I never for a second believe that I’m going to be brought in as Emperor of the world to institute my theories. 

Discussing topics to try to persuade or educate others on political philosophies that you think are good is a noble thing.  However, hating other people over their political views is not a good thing.

Well for the first time in 4 years I have dropped under 170 pounds.  My slow diet has a total of 11 lost pounds in 11 weeks.

The main thing I’ve been doing is greatly reducing my liquid calories. I was not aware of how many calories I was consuming by drinking juices and pop a day until I measured it.

The other thing has been a family-wide re-design of our dinners to be much lighter, healthier and frankly tastier.

This is the chair I want.

We had planned to launch the new WinCustomize today (the 9th birthday of WinCustomize.com) but we had go back to the existing site after we ran into a lot of DNS issues that we’ll work out during the subsequent week or so.

I expect to launch to be as smooth at the launch of the current site which means, not very smooth at all.   That said, let me walk you through the things we’re excited about in the new site and solicit feedback on what things you guys would like to see.

The Main Page

NEW:

The new main page is much cleaner and yet, provides access to a lot more useful stuff.

From the page you can access with a single click:

1. virtually every gallery,
2. the featured skins,
3. the top skins (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
4. top skinners (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
5. featured master skins,
6. newest skin,
7. latest news,
8. newest master skins
9. recent forum posts
10. featured articles

By contrast, the current site lets you get:

1. virtually every gallery
2. featured skin
3. today’s favorites
4. top master skins
5. featured articles
6. latest news
7. recent forum posts
8. poll

Of course, to get to those 8 things you need this much space:

OLD:

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s amazing that the old WinCustomize doesn’t even display the newest skins on the home page. It only displays the top 3 most popular skins of the day. You have to scroll down to see what’s new on the forums. If you want to see the most popular skins of the last 30 days you have to go through several steps on the old site.

The Gallery

NEW:

What I really like about the new gallery is that it’s now very easy to access context-relevant information like the top skinners in a given gallery and the most popular ones without having to do special sorting options.

By contrast, the right side was dominated by a parade of little icons for getting to the other galleries (on the new site, just mouse over explore just like on every page to get elsewhere). As a result, users were bombarded with a LOT of stuff, most of which was not relevant.

Skin View

NEW:

When you click on a given skin, you now has quick access to other skins made by that skinner. It’s easy to just go to the next skin in the gallery as well as an intuitive way to get back to the list of skins in that gallery (before you would have to hit the back arrow in your browser every time).

You still get instant access to all the other galleries and forum posts and such because of the universal mouse-over menu at the top.

By contrast…

OLD:

First off, note how much more screen space is needed to present less information. If you want to go to the next skin in the gallery, you have to hit back and then click on the next one.  There’s no info on what other skins this author has done. There’s no easy list to see what’s popular in this skin gallery from here. The thumbnail is blurry and hard to view.  Big walls of text.

SEARCH

NEW:

Click on the drop down to pick a particular gallery or search the entire site.

OLD:

Pray it works.

So those are some of the highlights of the new site.  Under the covers, once the server stuff is fully configured, it should be vastly faster too but like with the old site, it will probably take a few weeks to weed out various critical paths that need to be tweaked.

Greeetings!

I’m pleased to say that I believe we’re nearing the end of Beta 1.  Sometime next week we PLAN to release beta 1Z which is a very major gameplay update to Elemental (i.e. more radical than any previous beta).

Shortly after this beta, we will have a vote by the beta team to determine whether they believe the game is ready for Beta 2 (the multiplayer beta).

The vote will require 75% of beta testers to agree to go to beta 2.

What is the criteria? If after playing the beta of 1Z, if it is 33% of the way or more towards completion then you would vote  yes to go to beta 2. Otherwise, you would vote no and we would delay beta 2 for another build and discuss what needs to be done to reach beta 2.

If 75% of the beta group agrees to beta 2, then we would schedule a beta 2 approximately 2 weeks later which would begin the multiplayer phase of the beta testing (still cloth map mode only).  After a few weeks of testing that, we would again vote to see if we’re ready to go to beta 3 (the actual graphics engine mode).

Here's a Tour of WinCustomize 2010!

The Videos

Part 1

Part 2

 

A review of the new site versus the old site

The Main Page

NEW:

The new main page is much cleaner and yet, provides access to a lot more useful stuff.

From the page you can access with a single click:

1. virtually every gallery,
2. the featured skins,
3. the top skins (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
4. top skinners (today’s favorites, 30 days, all time)
5. featured master skins,
6. newest skin,
7. latest news,
8. newest master skins
9. recent forum posts
10. featured articles

By contrast, the current site lets you get:

1. virtually every gallery
2. featured skin
3. today’s favorites
4. top master skins
5. featured articles
6. latest news
7. recent forum posts
8. poll

Of course, to get to those 8 things you need this much space:

OLD:

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s amazing that the old WinCustomize doesn’t even display the newest skins on the home page. It only displays the top 3 most popular skins of the day. You have to scroll down to see what’s new on the forums. If you want to see the most popular skins of the last 30 days you have to go through several steps on the old site.

The Gallery

  

NEW:

What I really like about the new gallery is that it’s now very easy to access context-relevant information like the top skinners in a given gallery and the most popular ones without having to do special sorting options.

 

 

 

 

By contrast, the right side was dominated by a parade of little icons for getting to the other galleries (on the new site, just mouse over explore just like on every page to get elsewhere). As a result, users were bombarded with a LOT of stuff, most of which was not relevant.

 

Skin View

NEW:

When you click on a given skin, you now has quick access to other skins made by that skinner. It’s easy to just go to the next skin in the gallery as well as an intuitive way to get back to the list of skins in that gallery (before you would have to hit the back arrow in your browser every time).

You still get instant access to all the other galleries and forum posts and such because of the universal mouse-over menu at the top.

By contrast…

OLD:

First off, note how much more screen space is needed to present less information. If you want to go to the next skin in the gallery, you have to hit back and then click on the next one.  There’s no info on what other skins this author has done. There’s no easy list to see what’s popular in this skin gallery from here. The thumbnail is blurry and hard to view.  Big walls of text.

SEARCH

NEW:

Click on the drop down to pick a particular gallery or search the entire site.

OLD:

Pray it works.

 

So those are some of the highlights of the new site.  Under the covers, once the server stuff is fully configured, it should be vastly faster too but like with the old site, it will probably take a few weeks to weed out various critical paths that need to be tweaked.

When players design a unit that are asked to give it a name and a quote.

However, we don’t want players to feel like they have to do this.  To that end, we want to create a system where the game will “recommend” a randomly picked name and a randomly picked quote.

We thought it might be fun to let the beta testers get their suggestions on this into the game.

To that end, what kinds of fun and interesting quotes would you like be randomly selected as the default quotes and what sorts of interesting and useful names would you like to see used as suggested unit names?

People tend to project their hopes and dreams onto things based on their name.

They hear “health care reform” and they see their ideological allies supporting it and they assume it does all kinds of magical things.

For those of you glad that the bill passed, be aware that what was passed resembles nothing like what is in Europe or Canada. 

Here’s what it does (you can read the details at CBS News):

1. It “provides” insurance to 30 million Americans. How does it do this? They made it illegal not to buy insurance. Voila.  Seriously. That’s how they did it. If you don’t, you’re fined $695 annually.

2. They make it illegal for insurance companies to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. So the person with basic math skills who figures out that $695 annually is a lot less than $6,000 annually ($500 X 12 months) can wait until they get pregnant, diagnosed with diabetes or gets into an accident and THEN buy insurance.  Thus the cost will go far up.

3. They provide subsidies to make insurance cheaper. In theory.  Since the insurance companies are barely regulated monopolies per state who now know they everyone has to buy insurance, they can raise rates (this is what happened with car insurance when it became mandatory).

The right-wingers are going crazy about it because it socializes health-care.  The left-wingers are currently happy because they don’t realize just how much they got screwed. If/when this program starts to get implemented, I think they’ll start to realize how badly they got screwed.

People on the Internet who are from overseas tend to have no real understanding of America’s healthcare system. They don’t realize that the poor already get medical coverage for free (Medicaid) and that the elderly already get medical coverage (Medicare). 

So in effect, all this bill really does is make it illegal to not have insurance. 

Maybe they should use the same system to eliminate poverty. Just make it illegal to be poor.

About 10 weeks ago, I started a diet called 10 pounds in 10 weeks.  I was 180 pounds.

10 weeks later (technically 11, I took a week off for a trade show) I’m down 10 pounds.

I’m going to see if I can get down to 165 pounds (another 5 pounds).

It’s time to name the currency in Elemental.

The Random House team has come up with rigma which we like a lot.

An alternative would be gildars.

But if someone has a really cool name we’ll consider it.