A new feature for WinCustomize subscribers is now available - photo albums.  This new feature enables users who have WinCustomize subscriptions to easily upload up to 20 megabytes of images through a built in Explorer-like interface (for being able to upload dozens of pictures at a time) that become part of their photo album.

You can see an example of these photo albums through my personal page linked below.  As some of you know, WinCustomize costs tens of thousands of dollars each month to keep running.  With nearly 4 million unique visitors and many TERRAbits of bandwidth being used each month, we need every subscriber we can get.  To become a subscriber (or renew) go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/store/index.aspx

You can check out my embarassing pictures blow.

My 8 year old son is featured in a full page article in this month's Computer Games Magazine. Okay, I admit it, I wrote the article but it's about his adventures in the popular massively multiplayer game, World of Warcraft.  Check out the link below for a link to the article. If you see it at your local store, check it out. It includes a picture of my son's character dancing!

In this month's (April 2005) issue of Computer Games Magazine there is an article I've written about my 8 year old son, Alex. It's about his adventures as a Night Elf as part of our guild ("MythInc") on the Uther server in the game World of Warcraft. 

World of Warcraft isn't perfect, I know I have a long list of issues with the game. But it is, overall, a fantastic game. And for my son, it's a real thrill.  Him and his younger brother (Ryan, 4) will pretend to be playing the game even outside of World of Warcraft.  Ryan will run around with a plastic axe tucked in under his shrt behind his back. When he gets killed, he pretends he's a ghost and runs in that trademark World of Warcraft character running style back to his body.

That's the ironic thing about World of Warcraft, it actually works well as a game for all ages. It's not particularly gory. The most significant moral qualm is that many of the quests are essentially about going out to the countrside and butchering sentient creatures and taking their stuff so that you can get better at going out and butchering other sentient creatures to take their stuff and so forth. But that's not how my son is playing it anyway. For him, it's about fishing, hunting deer, cooking food, exploring the world, helping other people.  Not that he doesn't kill his share fo gnolls and bandits, but overall, he's getting a much fuller experience than the typical player is I suspect.

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For those of you not familiar with Stardock, it's the company that pays for most of the costs of WinCustomize.com.  Yesterday, we finally got around to updating the Products Page on the Stardock home page. 

I'm having one of those days today. I was supposed to give a class to our marketing & sales team today on how to effectively use Frontpage. So I brought in my trusty ThinkPad T40 laptop that I practically live on, fired it up, and got a blue screen saying that I had a corrupted volume. Luckily, it's NTFS so I can recover my data. But it's going to be a full reinstall on that computer.

The other hassle is trying to get into the new building.  Stardock has purchased a new building in Plymouth Michigan (we currently lease). But it's new new which means we're dealing with contractors and such.  Some contractors are good. Some are good at charging what seems to me to be obscene amounts for trivial things.  We don't have to be in the building at any particular time so we have a lot of leverage on the builders and such but it is incredibly frustrating dealing with that kind of thing on top of everything else.  It'll get sorted out I'm sure but I just want it all done so we can move in.

Below are some pictures from the new building that Marcel (Redmak) took while they were visiting recently.

Steve Parker (Neobond) and I in front of the building.

Outside of the new building

Steve (Neobond) outside

Going down to the frozen pond

Another outside shot

Stardock has released ObjectDock v1.11.  ObjectDock is a program that enables users to add a "dock" to their Windows desktop that contains short-cuts, running tasks, and "docklets".  It is highly configurable, easy to use, and very useful.  You can learn more about it here.

New in version 1.11 includes:

• New included Search docklet that can search Google, MSN, Yahoo, or elsewhere.
• Improved system tray support in Plus version.
• New languages supported
• Fixes to the per tray icon feature and sysstats integration
• Better Unicode support
• New "/settingsfolder" switch
• Separators supported in tabbed docks
• Zooming icons in tabbed docks
• Full listing here.   

ObjectDock is freeware. A plus version is also available that adds tabs, system tray support, task grouping, and hotspot support. Its home page is www.objectdock.com.

Every once in awhile I make a news item for this site. It's that time again where we tell our visitors to check out Daily Rotation, a great site for getting the latest news on pretty much anything! They were letting users have customized RSS feed personal pages before most places knew what RSS was!

FileFront has an interview with our team regarding Galactic Civilizations II. Take a look.

Samurize is a program that lets you easily create various kinds of system monitoring tools that live on your desktop. In fact, it can do a lot more than that.  Samurize is half widget enabling program, half rapid development environrment.