The Magic Desktop is almost here...

I don't know about you but one of the most annoying thing about any sort of power using accessory for the PC is the stupid power brick that comes with the accessory.  It's not just that I have a problem with coords (and I do) it's that I really hate having to mess with power adapters. 

This really comes to a head with computer speakers. Not only do I have to use a very particular computer hookup for them (audio out) but then I have to mess around with a giant power coord.  I have enough junk under my desk as is.  Power coords and audio cables just add to the mess.

That's where USB speakers come in.  First, I can plug them into any USB outline. And nowadays, people have USB outlets on their monitors, on their desk, in their keyboards, and all kinds of other convenient places.  So I don't have to go and dig around to the back of my computer to plug it in. Second, USB provides power -- enough to drive these speakers.

What's amazing about the Logitech V20 "notebook" speakers is how good they sound. They're actually quite good - much better than all but my highest end computer speakers which says a lot.  Unfortunately, Logitech is marketing these as "notebook" speakers and talking about their portability.  What I don't think they realize is just how many people are like me that want to plug everything into USB outlets if they can and not mess with power cables at all. I have mine plugged into my desktop PC and they work great. 

I highly recommend the speakers for people who want to have sound on their PC. They're not for audiophiles, the sound is defintely not as good as my high end Altec Lansing speakers but they are more than adequate for casual use.

One of the things that I find maddening about the American left is its penchant for saying something is bad or that something should be done and then sitting back and doing nothing themselves about it.

Whether the case be health care (where they simply expect other people to pay for their "compassion") or more notoriously, global warming.

The United States produces (for now) the most CO2 on the planet.  Eventually China will catch up (who isn't govered by Kyoto incidentally - and people wonder why the US rejected it) and far surpass the US in CO2 emmissions because environmentalism is just a catch phrase there.

So do you believe CO2 from humans is primary causing global warming? And if so, do you think it is a life threatening thing?

Then morally, aren't you obligated to do something about it? Right now?

1. Commuting to work more than 10 miles one way.  One third of our CO2 emissions come from driving.  It's not the gas mileage that's the problem. Nobody likes to talk about our dirty little secret: Americans drive too much.  If you're driving more than 20 miles a day, you're part of the problem. Quit it. Move closer to your job. Don't say you can't. You can. You just don't want to.   If CO2 generated global warming is really a global crisis, how can you sit back and do nothing?
   
2. Get rid of your air conditioner. Electrical Power for homes represents nearly 40% of our CO2 emissions. Eliminate that second refrigerator. Get rid of the outdoor lights. Get rid of that dryer. Don't take baths, shower instead.  Don't say you can't. You can. If it's the difference between life and death, you certainly can. Quit watching TV. A typical TV uses far more power than a typical computer.  You may not want to but if global warming is the end of the world, it's the least you can do.
   
3. No more long distance vacations. Whether you're driving (which is worse) or flying, there's no justification for driving or flying to a vacation destination. Not if lives are on the line.

If you truly believe that human produced CO2 is the root cause of global warming and that it will result in the deaths of millions, then how can you possibly not do the above 3 things?

21 years ago, me and Pat (T-man) ran Commodore 64 BBSes.  Back then, only a few people were into "on-line communities".  That's how we met. It was the summer after 9th grade for me and he had just graduated from high school.

From then on, we have run online communities together.  BBSes, then news groups, and later of course WinCustomize.com.

Today is T-man's birthday. And to my friend, I say to you, happy birthday. Few people are as lucky as I am to have such a good friend that they get to see every day and still do fun cool stuff together.

And some day in the distant future when I hit 40, when robots and interplanetary travel are the norm, we can look back at the years and smile that we never grew out of our hobbies.

Most people I've noticed don't do reviews on the prescription drugs they take.  Which is a shame because most adults at some point are on some sort of prescription drug and sharing their experiences with others could be very helpful.  This is particularly true with regards to drugs that are used to treat the myriad of mental disorders out there.

Before I was 21, I had never had any substance more heavy duty than an antibiotic.  I hadn't even consumed alcohol.  I have never tried smoking.  Throughout my 20s, the most experimental I got was drinking the occasional margarita while dining out.

But now I'm in my 30s and as an American, it is my God given right to feel perfect all the time in all ways. As any doctor will tell you, Americans tend to start to discover prescription drugs in their mid 30s. And by the time they're in their early 40s, they have either come to terms with whatever changes are occuring in them or they develop life-long dependencies on them that can lead to death.  Sometimes it is sooner (many famous men overdose on various types of drugs starting in their early 30s to early 40s). 

Many people start to really feel the bite of physical depression. That is, depression that has no known rational cause. It's not just about being in a bad mood. Depression is not the same as "I feel depressed".  It is different for different people.

Depression is often slow to be recognized. Denial is powerful. Usually, there is some triggering event that makes the person realize that they are feeling utter despair.

In my family, the trigger is usually the recognization of "is this all there is?".  This can lead to a sense of hopelessness and eventually utter despair in which nothing is enjoyable anymore.  A good way to tell if you have depression is if you sit down and itemize the things you generally find enjoyable and discover that none of them "taste" fun. 

In my case, it was that feeling of "taste" (this probably won't make sense to most of you) that was the key. I would list the things that brought me joy or fulfillment and none of them "tasted" fun anymore. This led me to discover the role of serotonin in regulating mood.

My situation is complicated that the feelings of despair were not constant. They were cyclical in which parts of the month I'd have what is called hypomania. The unique combination of temporary despair and hypomania in my peculiar circumstances were beneficial for most of my adult life.  Let me explain that below:

During the times of despair, I fully believed that if I simply accomplished a set of objectives that I would find the joy I was looking for.  Hypomania, by contrast, made me feel that I could accomplish anything I set my mind out to do.  Hypomania, in moderation, can be the catalyst for great success. And in my case, despair motivated me to make full use of the capabilities I had when I was in hypomania mode.

And so throughout my 20s and early 30s, I simply assumed that my moods had a rational origin. I felt despair simply because I had not yet accomplished my goals yet and simply needed to work harder. I didn't really understand how much of our behavior is controlled by brain chemistry. I believed my depression would go away once I had rational justification to be satisfied with my life.

So it is important to stress that physical depression is not rational.  If you lose your job or your wife leaves you or your dog dies and you feel depressed, that's rational and you will either get over it in time or you can seek counseling or therapy to work through the problems.  By contrast, physical depression is caused by something in your brain. It won't go away unless the chemicals in your brain change.

As someone who is happily married with 3 beautiful, healthy children. A wonderful and lovely wife; lots of friends; the ultimate dream job (I make computer games and desktop experience software); all the material comforts I could possibly want and a low stress lifestyle; etc., I knew if I wasn't in the land of joy, there had to be something else going on.  At some point, even a dullard such as myself could see that there was no rational origin to feeling despair.

And that made me take a hard look at my life: "I don't want to miss out on appreciating and enjoying my wife, family, friends and life that I have. It is time to do something."  And after a visit with my doctor led me to Celexa.

Now understand, I owe my material success to my pecular brain chemistry.  The certain belief that joy was around the corner if I simply accomplished more(tm) motivated me to work extremely hard and constantly work to improve myself.  And coupled with the magical hypomania with strong personal discipline gave me the capability to accomplish these improvements and objectives. 

Since college, self improvement has been a major goal. Self improvement would give me the skills necessary to accomplish the life objectives that I believed were the rational cause of my occasional feelings of utter despair.

Anyone who visits my home will probably notice almost immediately our "library".  I read a lot.  A book or two each week. History. Business. Anthropology. Biology. Physics. Self-Improvement (particularly in building empathy skills) and of course lots of Fiction.  It has not always endeared me to my extended family as some of them think I'm a know it all (not that they've said it but empathy is the closest thing I've found to a magical power -- if you build up your empathy skills and combine it with a reasonably objective mind you can practically read minds as long as you can see their face and body language but that's for a different discussion).

But like I said, at 35 having accomplished the major objectives I had set out to do and feeling only worse and worse, I knew that the feelings of despair weren't ratonal.

It is with this background I review the prescription drug Celexa. Celexa is one of the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that have come out in the past decade or so. They work by allowing your brain to keep more of the serotonin that is floating around your system. It is commonly believed that depression is largely caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain.

Celexa is a pill you take once a day. You have to take it every day.  If you don't, the effects will start to wear off.  You should not take it if you are bipolar as it can greatly affect your "manic" phases. 

Since I am somewhat bipolar (the hypomania part), I am not the ideal candidate for this.  But as individual adults, we have to decide for ourselves whether we can excercise the awareness and self-discipline to control manic aspects of our personalities.  My interest was in taking care of the despair. I would do my best to control the hypomania side. More specifically, what I have is called Cyclothymia (for those of you into this kind of thing). That is my self-diagnosis anyway.

My doctor has kept close tabs on this as I made him aware of this situation. When I first informed him that I have hypomania (after being on Celexa for 2 months), he asked me if I had done anything reckless? I responded "Well, not today. I just dropped off my mistress on the way here. Then I'm going back to the casino in the car I stole. I'm feeling lucky."  Suffice to say, you shouldn't joke about this because it is a serious issue -- if you are bipolar, SSRIs are not for you in general. Only you can judge if your manic phases are something you can control.

The Effects of Celexa

In the 5 months since I have been on Celexa I have noticed significant changes in my personality. Whether they are good or bad is very subjective.  Below are the changes I've seen:

1. I am happier.  I am significantly more satisfied with life in general.
2. I appreciate my kids and my wife significantly more.
3. I have poorer impulse control than before (i.e. I will tend to do and say what I want, when I want).
4. I have become significantly more materialistic. This is a change I don't particularly like. It's worth noting that in the 5 months I've been on Celexa I've purchased a Porsche 911 Turbo, got HDTV service, an iPod Touch, a very high end digital camera, a new 24-foot boat, a high end cell phone, and numerous other things.  These kinds of purchases would have been unthinkable a year ago even though I could easily have afforded them.  My friends would look on with amusement for years as I cheaped out on getting HDTV service and didn't even get a decent TV until my ancient 35 inch TV finally died.  Instead, I simply invested and invested and invested my earnings (literally saving the vast majority of my yearly income in various mutual funds, stocks, bonds, and other assets).
5. My productivity is significantly lowered. Much of my success in life can be put towards my ability to do "un fun" things in a timely manner. Now, I'm much more like normals where I simply avoid doing things that aren't fun.
6. I have to actually put effort into doing things that aren't fun. Whereas before, everything was equally fun or not fun so I had no problem doing the things that needed to be done because I didn't find those things "not fun".
7. I have started listening to music more.
8. My stress level is somewhat lower and more consistent.
9. I'm a lot nicer to people.
10. I'm a lot more candid to people - the hypomania is controlled but more present: I come across more conceited and smug (whereas before I might have come across more as an arrogant jerk instead).
11. I'm more patient.
12. I sleep a lot better.
13. I have a harder time staying up and working, even when I need to.
14. I'm less energetic overall.
15. I'm a lot more social.

As you can see from those 15 things, there's some good and some not so good results.  The bottom line question is - is it better to be happy or capable?  Because that's the net result when you get right down to it.  My capability to do things is significantly less than it was but I'm a lot happier with life. If I had been on Celexa 10 years ago, there'd be no company, no big house, no vast investment portfolios, no summer lake cottage, etc.  But I probably would have been a better dad and husband.

Your mileage will vary.

 WindowBlinds 6 reviews are starting to perculate.  WinCustomize.com will be covering these reviews (both positive and negative) to let others know what people think of Stardock's new Windows customization utility.

OSNews.com has, thus far, the most thorough review we've seen.  It can be summed up as liking the program but not liking the skins.

People not liking the skins made for WindowBlinds is the #1 criticism of WindowBlinds.  The more flexible something is, the more variation you will get.  Of course, another way to look at that is the more rope you give someone, the easier it is for them to hang themselves.

If you were to go through the WindowBlinds gallery and find the ten skins you would recommend to other people, what would they be? And what do you think of the argument that most WindowBlinds skins are ugly? And if so, what can be done?

I should be downsized. Those bastards at Stardock should downsize me.  When I was in my 20s, I was able to get so much done it was crazy.

Some people spend hours a day playing World of Warcraft or other such things.  That's the kind of person I am.  Ever see the South Park episode of World of Warcraft where the kids are playing against this griefer who lives on his computer?  That was me in my 20s and early 30s. Except I wasn't playing games.  I was writing them and skinning and working to create desktop enhancement software.

But now I'm 36 and have 3 kids.  You should see my 1 year old girl. She's so cute.  She owns me and my two sons.  And my wife and I find ourselves spending increasing amounts of time being parents.  Which has slowed my work time down considerably. 

Where I used to be able to do 84 hours a week easily (and it's really not hard to do that - it's just 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. Don't scoff, think of all the MMO players who do that sort of thing and pay for the privilege to do it).  Now, I'm lucky to do 60 hours a week.  That's a net loss of 14 hours each week. 

Needless to say, it greatly reduces my productivity. So I'm in the process of bringing my successors up to speed. People who can pick up some of the things I used to do.  You already see Zoomba and Island Dog all over.  They have taken over a lot of the stuff I used to do on WinCustomize and elsewhere. 

One of the places my reduced productivity has affected people is in the Magic Suite.  It's a premium suite we're giving away to Object Desktop users who have renewed until past January 1, 2009.

Here's some screenshots of it running on my desktop:

Like it? I sure do. But the gadgets are missing. Why? Because on Windows Vista, the UAC causes problems for gadget deployment from a suite. We're working on it but it's going to require an update in one of our programs. It's a pain in the butt.

So as you can see, it's almost done. But it's not quite there yet.  But it will totally rock when it's done.  Our ETA is about another week.

But much of the hold up has been my fault because there's a lot of coordination in this particular suite and I am the one doing the coordination and I budgeted my time based on what I've historically worked.  So we're on it. It's coming.  It totally rocks. Stay tuned!

The final beta of Galactic Civilizations II: Dark Avatar 1.7 is now up (as of last night).

This beta was going to be released as the official 1.7 but we wanted to do more testing on it just to make sure.

The main changes have to do with memory use reduction and a few other crash bugs fixed. With any luck, this version should be rock solid and ready to go.

This past week I took 2 days (Thursday and Friday) and combined them with a working weekend to go up north to work on some critical projects. Most notably, I needed to work on the technology trees for Galactic Civilizations II: Twilight of the Arnor. 

Going to a vacation spot to do work is always a tricky proposition. The temptation to...well...vacation is very high.  To see if working from the cottage was a viable activity from me in the future I tracked my time meticulously.  The results were disappointing.

While I averaged over 8 hours of work per day, I didn't feel I had enough to show for it.  I wrote approximately 40 pages of content (I had hoped to accomplish closer to 60) and managed to do a lot of reading.

The problems of working at the cottage that I ran into were:

1. The work environment is not as efficient. At home and at the office I have numerous high speed computers at my fingertips to call on. At the cottage, I took 2 laptops which were adequate but not nearly as powerful. Similarly, I have 24 inch monitors at work and at the office. I had a 17 inch monitor at the cottage. And yes, it makes a difference.
2. The ergonomics were problematic.  The desk and chair at the cottage were chosen for their aesthetics over functionality which I definitely suffered for. My comfy computer chairs at home allowed me to work many more hours at a time without taking breaks.
3. There was over 8 hours lost in traveling, unpacking, getting setup, repacking and returning.
4. General distractions.  I'm at a beautiful lake cottage with perfect weather and my kids and wife are there.

There first 3 issues are the most significant. There's an 8 hour overhead in travel.  This can be greatly reduced by choosing a different time to travel.  In the future, I'll travel up north Thursday after having worked (instead of traveling during work hours) and then returning home Monday morning before work rather than Sunday night.  If I did that, I'd gain back nearly all the overhead time.

Getting a more comfortable chair would also help significantly so that I could work for longer periods.  And, I hate to say it, I may have to consider getting a larger monitor.

In the future, I think the cottage is best used for paper work and other reading. I did accomplish a great deal of reading and analysis while I was there (including reading through a few of  the legal opinions that had backed up -- yes, you Americans are incredibly litigious causing even small companies to constantly deal with lawyers).

Below is a chart of my hours for those days. It's lower than I normally work (the chair was the big issue for that -- the importance of good ergonomics, I'm converted).

As I type this, I'm outside. It's October 7th and yet the weather in northern Michigan is quite warm (70 degres right now at 11:30pm). 

I'm not just outside though. I'm outside at the cottage at the lake.  Above me it is totally clear. I can see the milky way
(the literal cloud of stars) which I can't see from home due to light pollution. The waves are gently reaching shore about 10 meters in front of me. 

There's no bugs,it's just quite (other than the waves) and peaceful.  My only bummer is that my wife and kids have already gone back home. I stayed an extra day to get a little more work done and drive to work from here in the morning.

I came up here to get work done and that's what I did. I didn't get as much work done as I had hoped.  I worked pretty constantly while I was here but the occasional walk, visit with neighbors, and playing with the kids in the sand kept me from being quite as focused as I might have been had I stayed home. 

At home, I can and do work 12 hours straight getting up only to eat and for bathroom breaks. Not so here. I don't have a good chair for sitting in for long periods of time and once you're up stretching, it's hard to not walk on the beach a bit or take a stroll through the woods.

I feel very fortunate that to be able to do this. If I were religious, I would say that I am truly blessed. Either way, I am very thankful.

And now I'm going to turn off the laptop, look up at the stars and enjoy the view.