If you don't have the Winter Wonderland premium suite, now is the time to get it! You get it FREE with the purchase of any MyColors theme.

Visit http://mycolors.stardock.com.  You can also get it by buying a premium suite as well which you can look for here at http://themes.stardock.com.

Remember on Windows XP when there's be arguments over who was faster? Msstyles or WindowBlinds?

In the Windows Vista era, such arguments seem almost quaint as the massive performance advantage of WindowBlinds over Aero is undeniable.

Where it really shows up is in resizing windows.

Winter Wonderland MyColors theme

Try it for yourself. If you have Windows Vista, load up Aero, open up any program (the more complex, the better) and resize it with the default Aero. Then load up the most obnoxious, most complicated WindowBlinds skin and try it. The difference is pretty significant.

I have a new favorite blog tool and it's free. It lets me easily post articles to JoeUser that also include images in it.

Step #1: Get Windows Live.

Step #2: Set up Windows Live Writer with JoeUser:

This is very straight forward. The API is Metaweblog API and the posting URL is https://www.joeuser.com/api/MetaWeblog.axd

Step #3: Set up your image server

In my case, I got an FTP site (I pay $5 per month for this but there are many free FTP sites).

You only need to do this if you want to have images in your blog:

Step #4: Start blogging

You can set the JoeUser category, the title, everything from the writer. My only complaint is that you cannot set a sub-header which I think is kind of important. But it still works quite nicely.

The only reason I am not using Blog Navigator (despite it being superior in most ways) is that Blog Navigator doesn't support auto-thumbnailing of images which is a big deal to me and it doesn't underline typos.

The biggest reason the left and the right of American politics fight on issues of social policy has to do with the diverging views of what the role of the federal government is.

To the right, the federal government is analogous to a neighborhood association (NA). In a NA, the residents get together and vote on common rules for everyone to follow as well as an association fee that each neighbor has to pay in to the general fund to pay for things such as trash pickup, snow removal, lawn car and common area maintenance.

One could not imagine anyone in a NA begin to suggest that the NA start also paying for individual health insurance or that how much we pay in should be based on how much we make. But there is nothing actually preventing that from happening. It's only that such an idea is preposterous and would result in the wealthiest residents moving.

The book Atlas Shrugged works on a similar premise. What if the people who make all the money simply went on strike? What if they simply stopped producing and went away? The book shows how society, as we know it, would soon collapse.

That's because, in the real world, in any random group of people, a tiny handful produce most of the results for the rest. This is true whether you're talking about a small project or even in a given neighborhood where most of the work is done by the same few people over and over again.

When the far-left clamors for the government (the ultimate neighborhood association) to provide more and more benefits to individuals, they are hijacking the original intent of the founding fathers. Someone who argues that a politician who votes against expanded benefits for individuals is somehow a "Scrooge" has a fundamental misunderstanding of what the purpose of government is.

Which brings us back to our neighborhood association. If your neighborhood association began to try to force the most productive members of the neighborhood to provide disproportionately more to the neighborhood than what they receive in return what do you think would be the result?

How the federal government of the United States spends tax payer money has changed dramatically since 1960.  The priorities of the federal government have shifted from national defense and interstate development to providing a social safety net.

At the dawn of the 60s, national defense was 52% of our expenses. Social security and Medicare and Health were relatively small.  A relatively new category of spending called "income security" which is in which the federal government provides a "social safety net" to the poor and jobless, had grown to 8% by 1960.

By 2007 how things had changed:

Net interest payments had dropped to only 2% of the budget (they were 7% in 1960).  But now Medicare and social security have taken over. Health has grown to being 11% on its own.   Income security had grown to 14%.

In 2007, the United States spent $392 billion on Medicare, $586 billion on Social Security, $367 billion on "income security". That is a total of $1.35 trillion on those programs (national defense was, by contrast, $527 billion in 2007).

Social Insurance taxes (Medicare and Social Security) were only $884 billion in 2007 meaning that even before taking "income security" spending into account that the US federal government was spending more on these programs than was bringing in.  The remainder is coming out of individual and corporate taxes.

Below are the specifics including sources of income.

Source: MSN Encarta.

Other trends that have changed is that corporations no longer pay as much income tax as they once did. Part of the reason for that is the recognition that when you tax a company, you are simply taxing individuals since companies pass on those taxes in the form of higher prices which, in turn, make US companies less competitive in a global market.

When my company was smaller and struggling, I drove a very modest car. Nothing is a bigger obstacle to success than consumerism. People who squander precious resources on consumables are their own worst enemy. But in the past few years, as the company has become increasingly successful, I have increased the budget on what consumables I purchase. My attitude hasn't changed, I actually spend a smaller percentage of my income on consumables than I used to. It's simply an increase in consumption capacity.

A friend sent me an interesting article on CEOs and their auto choices. People like Warren Buffet drive modest cars. Others drive expensive cars. I am in the faction that drives expensive cars.

Why drive an expensive car to work? Won't that just create resentment and jealousy in my coworkers? My answer is: If it does, then they suck and should quit right now.

In my experience, when people are confronted with the success of another, they are either inspired to do better or they are angered. People who become angry and resentful of other people's success are typically (in my opinion) losers. To be charitable, people who are angered by the success of others typically are just envious of the ability of others or believe that the successful person doesn't deserve that success. In either case, those people have no business working with me. I prefer to work around people who recognize the clear connection between their accomplishments and their material gain.

I think one of the reasons why our company has been so successful is precisely because we tend to attract highly motivated people who know they are the masters of their own destiny. Those who think that success is a matter of dice rolling and become angry or resentful when they see material success are better off elsewhere.

With WindowBlinds 6 out, users have been looking for skins that make full use of the new features of WindowBlinds 6.

Stardock Design has been hard at work on lots of new skins and themes for various projects (which you'll hear more about soon).  But some of the new WindowBlinds 6 skins are starting to come out.

The first in the series is Elegance.

This is one of the best skins I have ever seen and used. It's incredibly light and useful. Click on the thumbnail above to get a closer look.

Beyond that, there's Aero Executive which will be out soon and Aero Graphite which will both be out fairly soon. Stay tuned!

A new WindowBlinds skin from Stardock Design will soon be publicly available in time for Christmas...

  In the beginning they were one race. And they really are still one race. But the seeds for the discord between the two factions of the Arnor came in their creation.  One group of the Arnor were created with the ability to perceive time. Their creator considered them superior in believing that the perception of time passing is a key to self-awareness and thus full sentience.  The other group was created without a sense of time perception. It was thought that this group would eventually be the servant class of the other group.

The ability to perceive time is something that mortals take for granted. Creatures that live a span of a century or so have no concept of eternity. What would it be like to live 1,000 years? What about 10,000 years? What about 100,000 years?  It is believed that what twisted the creator of the Arnor was that alone of the Mithrilar, the Arnorian creator did indeed perceive time and that perception ultimately ruined his spirit. 

For a long while, the Arnorians worked together and indeed, the pre-Dread Lord Arnor were the masters and the base-Arnor were the servants. Those who feel the touch of time are more driven to achievement than those who recognize eternity for what it is.  But in time, those who became Dread Lords became cruel and malevolent. When new species began to evolve the Dread Lords considered them worthless. What value is a creature that dies in the relative blink of an eye? What level of awareness of sentience can a being achieve in such a short amount of time?

And so ultimately, the only real difference between the Arnor and Dread Lords is the perception of time and its effect on immortal beings.