When I get into a political debate with friends or family that are liberal in their political views, at some point one of them will say "Well yea, you're conservative because you're one of the ones benefiting most from Bush's tax cuts."

I'm 33. So for most of my life I wasn't well off. Yet for as long as I've even contemplated what the role of government should be in our lives as well as what people should do for themselves versus what the "community" should do for them I've had conservative views.

In other words, I was a conservative long before I was making enough income to benefit from any sort of tax cut. 

Liberals tend to sneer as they talk about "tax cuts for the rich" and impugning those who are conservatives. There is always the temptation to turn it around and say that they're liberal because they want other people to have to pay for their half-baked life choices of failures.

The call-word of conservatism is "be your own man".  The call-word of liberalism is "we're in this together". Both are noble sentiments. But which one leads to greater success in the real world?  Most successful people I deal with are conservative. It's not even a close thing.  The people who have achieved the greatest levels of personal and professional happiness and are able to materially provide for themselves and families to the level they wish to are nearly always conservative in their philosophies. 

So which came first? Are we to believe that these successful people were once dreamy, warm fuzzy thinking liberals who, upon becoming successful suddenly changed into cold greedy conservatives who want to keep more of their money? I don't think so.  Instead, the conservative values of self-reliance ultimately lead to success more often than the values of liberalism.  And a result, most people who are successful are conservative.

Know someone who likes to jazz up their boring old Windows desktop? Here are some holiday gift ideas!

Utopia Icons. These incredibly cool icons will jazz up any desktop.

Unorthodox Skin Pack. Here are some alternative user interfaces for Windows!

Object Desktop MASTER CD. Have Object Desktop? Get a CD snapshot of the end of 2004 so that you can install it with the latest/greatest stuff from CD next time you have to reload your machine.

Renew your WinCustomize subscription. We need your support to keep doing what we do here. It is through WinCustomize subscriptions that this site gets paid for. Don't have a subscription? Then Click Here.

CursorXP. If you don't already have CursorXP Plus, now's a great time to get it. There are some great Christmas themed cursors out there that benefit from the features of CursorXP (such as cursor resizing).

ObjectDock Plus. One of the most popular programs on the Internet, ObjectDock Plus is a perfect blend of something that looks cool and yet makes Windows better. Most of the screenshots you find here are from users that use this program. Make sure you have it too!

Object Desktop. And of course, for those of you who don't already have Object Desktop, the best way to get the most out of this site (or most any other Windows customization site for that matter) is to make sure you have Object Desktop. It's a suite of utilities that let you add skins, themes, icons, etc. to your system that can really enhance the way Windows looks and feels.

And best of all, the money you spend on this stuff helps make WinCustomize better!

We're up to 15 members now over on the Uther server for Myth Inc.  Which means it's time to start thinking about Guild Tabards.

What would you like to see?

Under the covers the new WinCustomize.com is a completely new site.  Rewritten in ASP.NET, the new site boasts tons of new features.  Of course, it'll take some weeks to sqeeze out all the bugs. And we will be tweaking the layouts and so far this blue look we have is the only theme we have available. But in time, the site will become richer and neater looking but it'll take time.

But the new site does contain tons of new features that we think people will really appreciate.  Overall, our goal has been to allow more people to actively participate in the skinning community.  The old WinCustomize.com only recognized one kind of contribution: Skin authors. People who made skins, themes, icons, or wallpapers. 

The new WinCustomize now recognizes other types of contributors - tutorial writers, article writers, and advocates. 

Article Writers. You can write articles on OS Customization or Personal Computing and the site will monitor how many readers it gets and how many points it gets as a result. The top articles and top authors will then be listed throughout the site.  This will be expanded on as we get other parts of the site ironed out.  You do have to have a personal site on WinCustomize.com to create articles on WinCustomize.  Articles also get syndicated over to JoeUser.com (in fact, this article will be on JoeUser.com too).  You can write about anything else you want but those articles will only be displayed on your personal site and on JoeUser.com.

Tutorial Writers. How do you make good icons? What are some tricks to making nice UI graphics? What's involved in making a WindowBlinds visual style? This comes in the realm of tutorials.  What's nice about tutorials is that based on what category they're in, they will show up in the right bar on the particular skin library.  For instance, write a WindowBlinds tutorial and everyone browsing the WindowBlinds skin library will see that tutorial on the right.

Advocates. Advocates is a new concept. The idea is to acknowledge users who go out and try to spread the word of skinning/customization out onto other sites.  People who highlight other people's work and then tell others about it.  For instance, if I find a skin I like a lot, I can "recommend" it.  It then shows up on my recommended page on my personal site.  From there, I can then give a link out onto other sites of a particular recommended skin such as Moose which I recommended. Now, every time someone clicks on that link I get an advocacy point. The skin author also gets a point (for creating the skin).   I posted the skin over a Neowin with that link and if you look here you can actually see how many people came from Neowin. Only 27 but that's 27 more points I got.

If you click on the Popular tab. You can see the top advocates for the month and the top advocates of all time.  The Hall of fame, btw, starts with the launch of WinCustomize 2K5 (December 7, 2004) to give everyone a fresh start.

Popular Tab.  We still have to do some tweaking here so that it's more clear what time frame a given top list came from (last 30 days or since December 7, 2004). Plus some counts are based on subscriber downloads and not total downloads.  Subscriber downloads are easier to verify and less prone to manipulation. So the top download counts may seem low. Obviously we need to make it more clear when we're using total downloads and when we're using subscriber downloads.   If you click on the "more" at the bottom it becomes more clear usually.

But you can see the new areas we're tracking.  So it opens the door for far more ways to contribute to the site.

The Video.

If you have Windows Media Player 9 or later, you can get a video tour of the entire site that shows off a lot more good stuff.

[VIDEO TOUR HERE]

How do you define success? Different people define it different ways of course.

But most of the time, people in conversation qualify the term success.  They say things like "He is very successful in business" or "She has a successful marriage".

So what does success mean in the generic sense? What does it mean when someone says John is successful?

Here's my definition:

A successful person is one who is able to achieve a level of material and emotional comfort in which their needs and desires are easily met.  A successful person is someone who is happy in both their personal life and is able to acquire most material goods without consideration.

The more successful the person, the more the happier they are in their personal life and the more material desires they are able to fill without consideration.

Example:
A person who is happy with their home life, loves their job, can afford to go to the movies at any time they want, doesn't worry about how much dinner costs or how much a hard cover book they like costs is more successful than the guy who hates his job, has to go to the matinee showing of the movie, and has to wait for the discount paperback book to come out.

So in a debate, when I say someone is more successful than someone else, I am saying that that person has achieved some combination of being happier with their home life, happier in their career, and more financially capable of obtaining what material goods and services they desire without concern.

Okay guys, after two marathon days of coding, the IT team and myself have been working on getting the speed on WinCustomize to be better. Is it feeling better yet? Does the site feel peppier?

Holy cow what a week it's been.   First off, sorry JoeUser.com has been so buggy this week. We launched the new WinCustomize.com this week and it's using all new ASP.NET technology and we had some bugs in it that caused it to overwhelm the server.  It's still pretty intensve but it's getting much better.  But the result was that it was bringing JoeUser.com to its knees.

Monday and Tuesday I spent in New York. Got home Wednesday morning (last flight out).  Yesterday I worked until 1am, mostly trying to help get WinCustomize.com going and getting our various projects finished up

Today I have a ton of things on my plate. Spent some time talking to lawyers about non-competes. Someone we want to bring on has a rather nasty non-compete. The lawyers don't think it's a viable non-compete agreement because of a number of factors (such as the length of time and that it seems to be geographically fixated on Texas). 

Also spent time working on DesktopX stuff and helping get our new Marketing Coordinator fixed up with some of the things that I typically do.  So we did manage to release the Unorthodox skinpack at least so make sure you check that out.  But with WinCustomize having so many problems, it likely blunted the announcements.

But most of this evening was spent trying to figure out how to make WinCustomize faster. So that's why JoeUser.com was down.  JoeUser is kind of a pig too (as many of you know).  When we get WinCustomize figured out, we'll be spending some quality time on JoeUser to speed things up tremendously. We've learned a lot of stuff while working on the new WinCustomize. 

But here it is, 11:51pm and I'm still at work. My lovely wife was kind enough to bring the children in to see me and have dinner with them. I hadn't seen my oldest son, Alex, since Sunday! Christmas can't come soon enough. 

And despite spending a lot of time on email, I still have 471 email left to respond to. That's 471 NON-spam email (I get appoximately 2000 spam emails a day which get filtered out, any false positives I never see, I just never have time to look through them).  And I still have to put together the default widget/object/theme set for DesktopX 2.4, write a offer letter to a new employee, look over the press release for a new game, do a code-review on Galactic Civilizations II internal alpha 1, and finish the Galactic Civilizations: Prelude to War campaign.

Some of this is going to have to wait until tomorrow which means Friday's agenda will get mushed into Saturday.  So much stuff has to be set up for the holiday season. When so much of your business comes from individual users, you have to make sure things are ready at the right time and December is the busy month.

For Christmas, I just want to sleep, play with my sons, have some time with my wife, and read a good book.

Okay, it's going on 3am and my brain is starting to not function which means it's time to go home.

I can say that DesktopX 2.4's bundled widgets, objects, and themes are going to rock.  We included a cool corporate desktop template in there and we are including a lot more interesting DesktopX objects that people can use to build their desktop up with.

We aren't including quite as many widgets but instead are trying to include better widgets.  That said, I did run into quite a number of buglets in the current build so there will likely be a delay of a couple more days before we can release this.

Well, gotta get going, I have to get up soon to come back to this place!

New to all this customization stuff?

First off, make sure you click on the software tab above. 

You can also read the Skinning primer here: http://draginol.joeuser.com/index.asp?AID=67

If you have questions, feel free to ask them here.  If you need help with any Stardock software, make sure you use the support forum at the bottom of the forum page.

Which customization websites do you tend to visit?

Here are mine:

www.deviantART.com
www.xpthemes.com
www.Neowin.net
www.Aero-soft.com
www.Aqua-soft.org
www.Customize.org
www.Deskmod.com
www.Skinbase.org
www.LotsOfSkins.com
www.ArtUproar.com
www.Skinners.net
www.winmodify.com

That's about all the ones I can ring off here at 1am. Add to the list!