Skinners have an excellent opportunity to update their skins to take advantage of Windows Vista with minimal work: Vista shadows.

WindowBlinds 5.51 supports painting the shadows in Windows Vista as part of a UIS2 formatted WindowBlinds skins. 

To add support simply open the UIS file and in the [Personality] area add: AllowVistaShadows=1 and from then on, on Windows Vista, your skin will display the Vista shadow underneath it. 

Feel free to update your WindowBlinds skin on WinCustomize to support this feature as Vista users will likely appreciate the cool results!

JoeUser is a lot faster than it used to be and it's currently being rewritten in .NET to support a lot of new features. But I still find myself drawn to using BlogNavigator.

It works on any blog site that I know of but for me, creating blogs is so much easier with Blog Navigator than messing with the website which seems to take ages.

I've taken up beekeeping as some of you know. And I'm realy enjoying it.

The gotcha is that you're not supposed to mess with the bees very often. I find myself going out there and opening up the hive nearly every day which is a big no no (because it really disturbs them apparently) but what kind of hobby is one that you only go out there every few weeks?

I've tried to get into cars a bit. Ever since I got my Jaguar S-Type R, I've started appreciating cars more. But it's hard to find a decent car talk community and the ones I have found are full of pretty infantile people or people who can't afford anything beyond say a Mustang and hence want to crap on anything that costs more than $30,000.

For those of you reading this, what sorts of hobbies do you have outside the computer?

I'm working on an article on the above topic.

Is it getting too hard for people to get into skinning?

Consider these items:

• To make icons for Windows Vista now requires the icon author to invest in making 256x256 icons. When Windows 3.1 came out, 32x32 was the largest sized icon. A 256x256 icon has about as many pixels as a screenshot of a full-screen DOS VGA game did.
• Windows Media Player is incredibly complicated to skin for and the media player market is very fragmented. I use iTunes myself which isn't even skinnable. So there's a lot of work to make skins but the skinnable media player market has dramatically shrunk from the Winamp glory days.
• Making a GUI skin that looks as good or better than Vista Aero is very difficult now. When skinning first took off, it was Windows classic which looks like crap. And so even if you were just skinning the title bar and borders, it was still a lot better than what you started with.

So what do you think this means and what could be done? I have some opinions on this but I'd like to hear what you guys think first.

I've said this previously but it's worth saying again - widgets/gadgets have done bad things to skinning IMO. As someone who helped promote this problem before realizing the net result, I deserve my share of the blame.

I think one of the things we need to come up with are skinnable widgets.  It's something we're working on for Object Desktop but it's still very early. The idea being that making NEW widgets would become signficantly more difficult but that skinning existing widgets would be extremely easy (and let's face it, there's really only a couple dozen widgets out there with the rest being derivatives -- clocks, weather widgets, RSS feeds, and..um clocks). 

So how would you picture such a system working?

You could, for instance, have clock widget skins or you could tryto have a universal format for the widget platform where a single skin would work on all the types of supported widgets. That would make things better for the user but harder on the skinner and the gadget/widget maker.

I'm more inclined to have the platform be more akin to something where you would have skins for a type of widget (weather widgets for instance). So a weather skin would skin ALL weather widgets but wouldn't skin say RSS feed widgets.

What's your view?

One of the things I'd like to see happen on WinCustomize is better support for multiple wallpaper resolutions.

For instance, I'd like to be able to select 1280x1024 from a combo box, press a button and have just that sized wallpaper.

But how would you imagine the uploading of this kind of thing working so that it's not a pain in the butt for artists?

The cottage isn't done yet but it's getting close. Here's some recent pictures.

From the beech looking back.

From the deck (you can see the lake in the background).

Fancy bathtub. (faucets not on yet)

Stone chimney

You're walking in the woods or a field and there's a damn biting fly buzzing around your head. It keeps trying to land on your head and you know if you let it, you'll feel a painful chomp.  Those flies are almost malicious in the way they'll follow you around as you're walking. They're evil.

These flies are known as deer flies. You've seen them before when you occasionally managed to catch one as its biting you.

It turns out, it's not easy to get rid of them. You can't just put on insect repellent and call it a day.  No, these nasty bugs work by seeing motion. They see you moving and they go for your head.

Around here, they can get pretty nasty to the point where no one wants to walk around. There's not that many of them, but how many hyper-aggressive biting bugs do you need before you don't want to go somewhere. 

While searching the net, I found a product that claims to help. It's basically a sticky pad you put on the top of a baseball cap. You then walk around the area that has a problem and the deer flies get stuck on them when they land to bite. They look ridiculous. But the good news is that if you do it occasionally, you can really cut down on the # of deer flies (there aren't that many of them in a given area).

So what I found was the Deer Fly Defense Patch. And as ridiculous as they looked, they really do work.

After walking around the woods on our property

I just put the patch on my favorite hat. When I'm done, I just remove the patch and toss out the caught flies. I got 10 of them in just a few minutes. After that, I could walk around in relative peace.  My kids had a blast with them as well.

Anyone who has ever felt the painful bite of these nasty flies (often mistakenly called horseflies -- that's what I was calling them before I looked it up) can now know the sweet revenge.  Flies think they're smart but I can now prove to them that I'm twice as smart as they are!

As the company has grown, I have had to spend more time at the office.  I used to work 4 days at the office and then 1 day at home every week.  In fact, sometimes I'd work 3 days at the office and 2 days at home if there were particularly important things going on.

Working from home isn't for most people.  For many people, working from home results in a loss of productivity because of communication issues, lack of resources, etc.  But in my particular case, working from home results in vastly greater output.

My case is a bit unique because I'm what you'd call an executive with a focus on execution.  That is, a significant % of the company's raw work product output comes from me in one form or other.  My relative percent has decreased over the years as we've brought on more people but my overall output has continued to grow and the value of that output has grown with it since I have tried to stay on things that are more crucial to the company.

At home, I don't have the distractions I get at work. I can just sit in my chair with my various computers (I have 3 computers at home on my desktop that I connect to with Multiplicity Pro). Plus, I have lots of handy snacks near by which are particularly important to the way I work.

So at home, I can go through web pages in peace and optimize them. I can write up articles which tend to be crucial to our traffic. I can help put together email, magazines, etc.  I can play around with our various beta programs in peace for long periods of time without being interupted and put together detailed reports and specifications. And of course, I can write code.

But working from home has a price as well. There's a small morale penalty at the office when I'm not there.  That is, I am concerned that people will feel I'm not working hard enough or that I'm just at home relaxing. What they don't know is that the key stuff that I do gets done at home. I basically am at the office to help follow-up with people to make sure projects are staying on track, help play communications traffic cop between departments, and just talk to people to give feedback/kudos/suggestions on what they're doing.  These are important things by all means. But the time I'm not spending working on the "key" stuff costs us money.

Now, one might argue that I could keep hiring people to do all the little things I do. But that's not a practical matter. My skillset has been developed, over a period of a decade, specifically for Stardock.  So my ability to quickly edit web pages, write up specs, debug code, QA software, create mailers, etc. would require a lot of different people.  Moreover, there's just so many little things that would go unnoticed (And do go unnoticed) that it would be incredibly inefficent to have other people do them.

For instance, I'll find a page that hasn't been updated to mention that the program works on Windows Vista.  Or I'll find a typo on a product or an unclear description (buying WindowBlinds on CD, for instance, was a convoluted process that was only fixed this morning when I noticed it).

So today and tomorrow I'm working from home.  And then all of next week. With any luck, I'll be able to get a lot of work done -- at home.