At the airport today I was amazed at how many "Get rich!" books there are at the book stores. I don't happen to ascribe to the belief that everyone can get rich.  I think there are a number of basic prerequisites that one has to have in order to become wealthy.

In no particular order, here are characteristics that wealthy people seem to have in common:

1. They don't just have ideas, they do something about them. This is a big deal. I always hear people coming up with interesting ideas but then finishing with saying "Yea, someone ought to do that."  I've passed on some ideas in the past that I think could make someone much better off financially but when I follow up, they've done nothing.  For example, up at Higgins Lake they have a serious zebra mussel problem. I read on-line that a 400hz frequency generated in the water near them will cause them to not be able to secure nutrients from the water which, after around 40 days kills them.  Someone could build this relatively easily.  Parts would cost around $50 and could be sold to dock owners at lakes for around $200.  Another simple example would be cheap, easy, hand sand sifters for beaches at lakes.  These ideas won't make someone rich. But I'm amazed at how often I'll bump into people who could make these things easily, need the money, and have the time but still won't do them.
   
   The point being, people come up with ideas but few people actually follow-up on them.
    
2. They don't get discouraged.  When doing something that requires effort, setbacks are inevitable. Successful people tend to not be discouraged easily. In fact, for a lot of successful people, being "discouraged" is a foreign concept.  This is important in multiple ways. First, it means they won't grow bored or lose focus on what they are trying to achieve. Secondly, it means that when something blows up on them, they won't give up.
    
3. They have delayed gratification.  This is another big one.  People who build a successful enterprise are almost always people with a well developed sense of delayed gratification.  They don't plitter away their capital on things.  In my own example, for the first 10 years of my business, I didn't own a high end car.  I could have.  I remember the owner of a website who sold out during the dot-com. He was 22 and took his $300k buy out and bought himself a Ferrari.  I suspect he's probably working for someone else now.  By contrast, that $300k could have been used as capital to invest in things that would have far greater long term rewards.
    
4. They don't blame others. Whenever I meet someone who starts blaming their problems on other people I can't help but think "loser".  If someone takes the attitude that other people
   "have it out for them" the odds are that they're failures.  Successful people tend to blame themselves and combined with item #2, use that to make themselves better.  If you meet someone who uses the word "luck" (either good or bad) a lot you're probably meeting someone who isn't successful.  Whenever someone thinks their destiny is in the hands of other people or luck they're limiting their success.
    
5. They have a positive attitude. Successful people tend to believe in themselves and have a "can do" attitude.  This doesn't mean they're bubbly or happy people. What it does mean is that they think that if they put their mind to it, they can do it.  The people I meet who haven't done so well in life tend to be very quick to list off the various obstacles that they face that keep them from succeeding.  A successful person might list challenges they face but is also working out a plan to overcome those challenges.
    

My first Summer as a bee keeper is starting to draw to a close. I've had decidedly mixed results. Of the 3 hives, one of them is thriving and the other two are failing. The bees in those two other hives just don't seem that interested in building comb (they have to build comb in order for the queen to lay eggs or store honey and pollen). 

When I get back from my latest trip (I'm currently on a plane on the way to San Fran) I am going to merge the two weak hives in the hopes that it will give them a fighting chance this Fall.  I'll have to aggressively feed it.

I don't have any pictures handy of my apiary but it is a golden rod paradise. There's definitely no shortage of flowers to forage.  My one strong hive appears to be in pretty good shape for the Winter. 

Still, I'm not discouraged.  I learned a lot and I still plan to have 5 hives next year.  Probably the biggest thing I learned is not to mess with them so much.  The hive I spent the least time on did the best.  I also think that I overfed the two weak hives.  The one strong hive I only fed in the Spring.  Next year, I'll take a much more hands off approach -- feed in Spring and Fall but in the Summer they're on their own.

When I did my most recent inspection, I had to tear things apart quite a bit. I was wearing a lot more protective gear (thankfully) as I got 3 stings in my gloves. To be fair, I wouldn't have been so quick to nudge bees around with my fingers if I were bare handed. 

One thing I've also learned is that bees die. A lot.  I used to spend inordinate amounts of time making sure I didn't crush any bees when I put the tops back on.  But as the hives get bigger, they get more defensive and the one real sting I got was due to me pushing bees with my thumb away from the edges.  Now, I will try to get as many as I can off the edges but I have had to accept that I'm going to probably kill a few bees each time I open them up.

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I just finished finalizing the story for Twilight of the Arnor.  While Dread Lords and Dark Avatar were interesting in their own ways, I think that this campaign will be the most fun and interesting of them all. Players will really get to learn about the Precursors and there will be a LOT of Dread Lord action in this. There are entire missions where it's just you vs. Dread Lords. It's no holds barred.

One interesting mechanic will be the addition of the new Immense sized galaxy which one of the campaign missions makes use of.  With 400+ sectors in a given map, there will be plenty of action.

All players of GalCiv will also benefit from Twilight of the Arnor since we'll have to optimize a lot of code in order to make possible some of the things in Twilight.  And some of those optimizations will be made available throughout all versions.

Hopefully people will like what we're doing with Twilight. It's going to play a lot differently in the campaign than the previous ones.

I am in an airport right now communicating with my Verizon 5750 which is an awesome air card.

I am also finishing my first business trip with the LG Env cell phone which just rocks.  The cell phone part was very helpful (it has great speaker phone capability) but where it really came in handy was its built in GPS and local search features.  Being in Manhattan, there's a lot of stuff everwhere but it's really nice to be able to look up the local Best Buy or a good Italian restraurant or whatever and have it show you real time directions on how to get there from where you're at.

It also has email syncronization which is really nice so I can get messages on the road.

My only complaint about Verizon is that they have way too many UserID's and passwords. I can't even get into half of the features because I odn't know all the passwords to my account.

But the phone itself rocks.

I'd love to hear the thoughts of skinners on whether the new SkinStudio beta (version 6) is working out well.

Skinning has to get a LOT easier than it's gotten in the past year or two.  So how are we doing?

We have so many ideas that we've documented based on player feedback that we could keep doing expansion packs indefinitely.

Some people might say, "Why not do a sequel?" but as a practical matter, whole new games are much more expensive to do than expansion packs are. 

In the case of Galactic Civilizations, the soonest a GalCiv III would come out would be like 2010 and that would be a best-case scenario.  That's because the bulk of our development resources are working on the unannounced fantasy strategy game.

But expansion packs can be done with smaller staffs since you have the basic game there to do.  But that raises the question, how many expansion packs do people want and how radical should they be?

For example, I would be open to revamping the whole economic system in a future expansion pack to help streamline it.  I'd also like to expand the United Planets to allow civilizations to submit "bills" to the UP to vote on.  I'd also like to see more types of ship components, more diplomatic options, and so on.

Other players have requested things like multiplayer, tactical battles, fast carriers, invasion improvements, and so forth. 

But the question is, would players be interested in another 2 or 3 or more expansion packs in the future?  (or put another way, would there be enough players interested to pay for the cost of development)?  Or would it make more sense to have Twilight of the Arnor be the final expansion pack and move fully on to other projects and do a sequel in 3 or 4 years?

What do you think?

This is a real tragedy but a woman in a mini van was racing through a parking lot to try to beat a train to the crossing.

She lost.

Inside her van were her 4 children. Two of them (her two daughters) were killed.  Her two sons survived but were badly injured as well as the woman.

32-bit gaming is going to come to an end.  Not today. Not tomorrow, but a lot sooner than most people think.

That's because no matter how much memory your PC has, no matter how much virtual memory you have, a given process on a 32-bit Windows machine only gets 2 gigabytes of memory (if the OS had been better designed, it would have been 4 gigs but that's another story).

Occasionally you run into people in the forums who say "I got an out of memory error".  And for months we couldn't figure it out.  We don't have any memory leaks that we know of and the people who reported it had plenty of virtual memory.  So what was the deal?

The problem was a basic misunderstanding on how memory in Windows is managed.  We (myself included) thought that each process in Windows may only get 2 gigabytes of memory but if it ran out of that memory, it would simply swap to the disk drive.  Thus, if a user had a large enough page file, no problem.  But that's not how it works.  After 2 gigabytes of memory, the system simply won't allocate the process any more memory. It simply fails and you will end up with a crashed game.

This is a very significant problem.  In Galactic Civilizations II v1.7, we'll at least be able to address this with more aggressive dealocation routines (which I really hate having to do, I really prefer the idea of once something is used, to keep it around for performance -- I've always been a proponent of performance over memory use).  But we'll be able to do it here without any noticeable affect in performance.

No, the real problem is in future games. If 2 gigabytes is the limit and a relatively low impact game like Galactic Civilizations is already running into it (and it's no memory hog), what's coming up next?  How about this -- when your video card runs out of memory for textures, it goes to system memory. And I think (but haven't tested this) that the memory it grabs belongs to the game process. 

Console game developers would simply laugh at our complaints and say that we just need to get better at de-allocating memory.  But that's only a short-term solution.  Gamers, particularly PC gamers, want to see their games get better looking and more sophisticated. 

So at some point, in the next few years, serious gamers and high-end games are going to have to require 64-bit machines to play them.  It'll probably be several years before it becomes common but it's coming. 

The good short-term news for GalCiv players is that we'll be able to have larger sized galaxies in GalCiv II: Twilight of the Arnor without running out of memory and users of GalCiv II will be able to avoid running out of memory once they get v1.7.