One of the coolest features (I think) of Stardock.net sites are the referral links.

Some sites have "track back" but it's a long, painful, manual process.  On Stardock.net sites like JoeUser or WinCustomize or GalCiv.com ro whatever, if you link to a particular article, you can see your link and how many people came to it from your link via referrals. It's very cool.

Under nearly every post here, you can see a referral field that tells how many sites are referring to an article.  For fun, let's see how many places we can get to link to this article.

Link to this URL and you'll see the referral appear below.

So you're a kid. La-di-la-la.  One day you're 19. At college. Trying to get through your classes. And then one day you wake up and you're 33, married with two children.

The good news: Your acne cleared up.  The bad news, your hair may be thinning. The zits are gone, but now I swear my hair is thinning. I'm not sure, it used to be too painful to comb it. But I swear it was thicker before! I hear that propecia can fix it but on the one hand, I'm married. Who gives a crap how I look? My wife's happy as long as I bathe and even then she's okay as long as I'm not stinking up the place.  On the other hand, where's that small window between zits and thinning hair? That's not fair!

Not that I'm losing hair universally.  My eye brows seem to be getting thicker! And I think there's a hair growing out the side of my nose! What the hell happened?

And the other day, some pathetic dweeb on Neowin called me "Old man" (apparently those who don't live in mom's basement qualify as "old man".)  I'm too old to be able to hang out with college students but I'm still young enough to outrage the stuffy old guys who still don't get this on-line thing where CEOs of software companeis can write "Kiss my ass" to obnoxious "customers" who think because they've paid $20 that you have to kiss their ass and thus should be able to say the most horrible, hurtful, nasty things about you. It's that middling period.

I'm old enough to worry that my 8 year old son won't be tough enough but young enough to realize that I still need my dad to come with me on my trip to the mountains because I can't quite "figure out" how to put up a tent or work a "gas" powered stove.  I'm old enough to worry that my sons are too pampered but young enough to not consider that my new S-Type R Jaguar may send the wrong message to people around me.

The good news is that I'm old enough to afford any drinks I want to get.  The bad news is that I'm also too old to really care about "Scoring" (sorry ladies, I haven't napped today and besides, my wife doesn't like me bringing strange women home, she's really..possessive).

I'm young enough to get annoyed at some geekling European (sorry, but they're always from Europe) who gets pissed off on some web forum because I actually like to talk about the stuff we make but old enough not to really give a crap that they're pissed off because if some 19 year old geekling isn't pissed off that I'm talking about what we make they'd be pissed off that I make a living off of it.  Don't worry, I don't mean to leave out the 49 year old fat, balding, single tech type who likes to start every conversation with "I've been in IT for 20 years and I...<insert dubious claim of how someone else's stuff confuses him which shows how bad it is because he's been in IT for 20 years>".  Yes we get it, Wise and Installshield installs confuse and intimdiate certain 52 year old IT guys with 20 years of experience and have attended user groups since the original Altair or whatever it was called.  Don't worry, I'll soon be joining your ranks as I recount my days of typing "load *, 8, 1" and complaining that I can't figure out how to use my next-gen cell phone.

Speaking of which, why can't I take a picture with my cell phone while I'm talking to the person? Hello??

Advice for parents: Don't rush your kids through school. If I could get away having my 8 year old son in first grade, I would.  Better to be older than everyone else than younger.  Man, if I could go to college now with what I know now. I'd rule. I already know all the Pac-man patterns for instance.

Advice for people who object that I write articles on non-Stardock products that compete with our stuff: Write your own damn articles. I'm not the government. No one is stopping you from writing the greatest msstyles vs windowBlinds or DesktopX vs. Konfabulator or ObjectBar vs. whatever article out there.  Go for it. I'll highlight it if it's legible.  Type Skin Primer into Google and THIS comes up. Boo hoo, write your own if you don't like mine.  Guess what, if the article appears on a site owned by Stardock it is probably going to favor Stardock or at least not trash it.  Here's another secret: If you read a Linux vs. Windows article on Microsoft.com, odds are it's not going to favor Linux.  That tip is for free.

In the advice to loose canons on the net: If you're an individual, don't screw with companies. Evil corporations will almost always crush the idiot blowhard in legal proceedings unless there is personal physical injury.  It's the Internet. If you're a blowhard, know your limits.  If I'm pissed off at Microsoft or Apple, well, that's fine but if I start making legal threats against them, they'll crush me like a bug. Only if I can find a way to get that iMac to burn me or something would I have any sort of shot at "Getting back".  So shut-up and suck it up. Take it from a guy who knows, unless it's personal injury the bigger company always wins.

Speaking of small companies, Style XP 3.04 adds support for letting you change your screen savers.  So apparently for people who don't know how to change their screen saver from the display properties here's another way to do it and it'll only cost you $20 to do it.  Good for them.  Those people who bash Stardock for charing a whopping $20 to actually create a full blown skinning engine might want to look around a bit.  one can imagine v3.1 -- now can change wallpapers (oh wait, does that already, my bad).

Did I mention you get cranky when you're becoming less young?  We all promise not to do what our parents did to us.  My son is in little league and when he plays second base in practice he doesn't run over to cover second when the ball goes to short-stop.  But I remember my mom marching onto the diamond to grab me and walk me over to cover second if I forgot to cover second when the ball was hit to short. Withhold food for fielding errors? Yes. Walk on field in practice? No. You have to have boundaries.

Part of getting less young is forgetting things. There used to be a skinning site dedicated to talking about "customization" stuff from everyone except us (because we're evil where evil is defined by those who make a living doing it).  Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the site or I'd tell you.

Other advice to young software developers: Don't waste your summers working overtime. You can't get them back.  We actually schedule summers at Stardock to be free of major milestones so that no one is working overtime.  Fall may be harsh but summer is nice.  Sorry, no big releases this summer.

Okay, that's about all for now.

..Once upon a time I wanted to be an electrical engineer.  I would design the next generation computer CPUs. A job at Intel or Motorolla.

But somewhere along the way I ended up writing some game for OS/2. I didn't even know how to program at the time. I bought "Teach Yourself C in 21 days" and a couple OS/2 programming books and wrote a game.  I didn't get actually paid for that game because the publisher ripped me off. Took the money and ran. So fine, I would write software and publish it and also publish the software for other software developers so that they didn't have to go through what I went through.

But to do that I would need to bring in other people to help with that.  Marketers, sales people, managers, relationship managers (what the hell is that?), an dother people. And of course, OS/2 died off (unless you're one of the freaks who hangs out on comp.os.os2.advocacy still) so then we had to move to Windows so I had to become a financial management guy too as we migrated.

Over time, I slowly found myself not writing very much code but managing these dozens of people.  Next week, I am going to schedule some time to write some code for one of our products.  I may get to spend a total of 16 hours next week writing code! The rest of my time I'll be grumpy old man walking around the office cranking at people for not doing what they do as fast or as well as they should.

The moral of the story is that electrical engineering is not a good background for managing people. Though it will teach you how to design the perfect electrical whip...

I have a new home made drink that I will share with you. Learned the secret from a local pub.

You take some vanilla vodka and mix it with chocolate gadiva chocolate liquor and some white chocolate gadiva chocolate liquor.  Mmm. Very nice.

How screwed up are the bankruptcy laws?

Well, there's a company that owed us over $300,000 in royalties. Literally took in money that was supposed to be for us and simply didn't pay us.  In order to keep us from making a loud public hub-bub about it, they agreed to let us sell some of their products through our store so that we could apply those sales to their outstanding debt.  Their royalty ended up being fairly small, say $2,400. 

But through the magic of bankruptcy, this company claims its debt has been zeroed out and now wants us to pay it $2,400 in cash on the basis that its debt to us -- over $300,000 or so, no longer exists. 

Is that gall or what?

There's a lot of really cool stuff out there that lets you customize Windows in various ways.  Stardock may make much of the popular/cool stuff but there's some neat stuff going on.  Here are some highlights of things I really enjoy looking at.

If you're into skinnable calendars, check out Rainlendar:

I don't tend to use Rainlendar that much since my DesktopX based calendars do the trick. But Rainlendar has a lot of very good features to make use of and has a lot more skins.

At the risk of being flogged, Winamp, which I personally think deserves a big share of the credit for getting skinning going (and certainly for coining the term "skin" for use in the GUI changing sense) is not quite as popular as it used to be.  But it's still getting some good stuff:

Windows Media Player skinning hasn't taken off that much but thanks to the efforts of The Skins Factory, which can be a pain in the butt on occasion does deliver some incredibly good stuff:

This is their Batman Begins skin. You can get it here.

Litestep used to be THE alternative shell for Windows. Unfortunately, it's been fading quite a bit in recent years.  Hey, Litestep advocates, let's see some cool new stuff! There's only been 9 themes uploaded to WinCustomize this year!  This reminds me that we really gotta start getting specific gallery moderators who are in charge of keeping their section alive. Stardock sections have advocates but we need to get advocates for the open source stuff too.

Meanwhile, DesktopX may do great when it comes to creating animated desktop objects and full-blown desktop "themes" but when it comes to widgets, it's Konfabulator's whipping boy.

That's a nice battery meter widget for Konfabulator. You can get that here. 

Meanwhile, the final proof that people are selectively insane, Kapsules, which is a freeware competitor to Konfabulator and has an identical feature set doesn't get nearly the widget support that Konfabulator gets (and yet people will scream about paying $20 for WindowBlinds) does get some pretty neat stuff:

Which you can get here.  I guess the model is that it's better to make free widgets for a $20 program than free widgets for something that is given away?

Speaking of free things that have tons of features, there's also Samurize:

Sure, it has a built in development environment and sure it has a ton of features and options but on the downside it's free..

AstonShell isn't free but it is pretty cool:

I like the program though I did get annoyed with one of its advocates that tried to argue that WindowBlinds was somehow "buggy and hard to use" while at the same time advocating an alternative shell whose themes requrie the user to do some serious surgery to make work on a given system.  If you use alternative shells, you can pretty much expect to have to customize a given theme to your liking. But for people who are serious about this, it's no biggie and they're pretty cool. I'd like to see WinCustomize eventually have an Aston section.  Comment here saying "We need an Astonshell you bastard Stardock people! Quit holding down the 'competition' with your bastard ways!" (or something to that effect). Though if you can't find a way to inject the word "Bastard" into your request then you're obviously not serious so don't waste our time...bastards.

A lot of people like AveDesk. But it still doesn't have its own website so instead its fans hang out, dominate Aqua-Soft. So it's hard to recommend it even though I like the author.

Remember Hoverdesk? Not much has happened with it for awhile which is a bummer because it was pretty darn cool. Something happened to its deviantART section, not sure what the deal is but it seems to be done.  HoverDesk was a competitor to Litestep/AstonShell but had some great themes thanks to Dangeruss.  Is the alternative shell scene dying?

One buttkicker who keeps moving forward is Jorge who runs Winstep.

WinStep makes a bunch of cool utilities such as NextStart and Workshelf.  Now, if we were like some Mac developers, we would say "Workshelf is a knock-off of ObjectDock.  But the truth is that we all got our ideas from NeXT back from the 1960s or whatever it was.  Workshelf is a tabbed program launcher.  NextSTART is a lot of things but ultimately is a highly configurable desktop menu replacement that is a lot like Stardock's own RightClick before those bastards at Stardock made RightClick. Bastards.

But Workshelf continues to move forward in development and there's sections available on WinCustomize.com.

And of course, how can we forget MSStyles which is one of the two popular visual style formats.  The other popular visual style format being that Windowsblind program from Starduck.  Since WindowBlinds users can use msstyles no problem if they have SkinStudio installed, one has to wonder why the heck we didn't put up a msstyle section on WinCustomize.  The time may come when we should do that.  If you want an msstyles section on WinCustomize, you need to make a comment saying "Hey, Stardock bastards, quit denying us an msstyles section..bastards!" 

The reason this will become a big deal is well, you know that Longhorn thingy? Next version of Windows and all? Well, the msstyles of today go bye bye. The only realistic way to run msstyles on Longhorn is going to be (wait for it) through conversion and since SkinStudio has had two years of time to figure out how to convert this stuff, that means that only through converting msstyles XP to WindowBlinds or msstyles Longhorn will those existing msstyles work on Longhorn.

I'd like to take this moment to publicly thank Snowman and Snidely and others who take the time to ask msstyles authors if they can convert their msstyles into WindowBlinds format. And while 90% of msstyles continue to be "Look, it's Luna but now it's red!" or "Hey, look, it's MacOS X but with the buttons on the right" there are still some pretty cool msstyles out there.

Example is this one called Black Mesa. It's over at deviantART. But like I said, if you download and install SkinStudio (and run it once) you can use this in WindowBlinds as well. Of course, if you run it under WindowBlinds it'll suffer from things like hardware acceleration, the ability to change its color/hue, and skin non-theme aware programs (this is where you write in the comments area "Hey, Stardock bastard, quit plugging your stuff in this non Stardock oriented article..bastard!").

Seriously though, those who are getting permission and making WB versions of msstyles are doing people a favor and should be appreciated. The WindowBlinds UIS format is like Noah's arc when Longhorn comes around. Longhorn's msstyles abilities will be quite cool with alpha blending and such (though for support/branding reasons it'll be encrypted -- unlike msstyles on XP which were documented) so while there may be some new msstyle type way of doing things, one thing we can be pretty sure of, existing msstyles will have to be converted.  And we'll make sure we can convert them to whatever (this is where you add "Dammit, I mean it, quit plugging your crap, don't make me come over there!").

Well that's enough plugging for other programs for now.  BTW, next time someone complains about me writing this stuff, remind them that "Hey, bastard, why don't you write your own article then?" I tell ya, people will sit back and knit-pick me writing articles on skinning because it's my day job forgetting that they certainly could write up their own views and I'd happily feature it.  I'm into this stuff enough that I made it part of my career.  Of course, I also write video games and..shockingly, I actually play video games made by other people and (gasp) talk about video games made by other people too. It's a real scandal I tell ya!

Here are the most popular articles from the month of May below.  You can create your own articles from your personal page (if you don't have one, click on the "Sites" tab at the top of the page).  I have 8 of the ten, help put an end to my evil tyrrany of propaganda and evil (did I already say evil?) and other evil (doh said it again) stuff. Write articles on skinning, technology, computers, software, etc.