So what ever happened to that ObjectBar thing anyway? You know, the program in Object Desktop that had so much potential to really make Windows into a much more productive environment?

Click on the screenshot to find out. In essence, ObjectBar 2 is almost ready for beta.  One of the big new features in it is that it can incorporate DesktopX widgets.  So rather having to make the ObjectBar "skin" format insanely complicated for doing really advanced looking graph readouts and RSS feeds and all those other goodies people like to put on these kinds of things, users and authors will be able to simply select a DesktopX widget and put it in there. 

As any DesktopX widget/object author can tell you, creating custom looking content for DesktopX is a snap. So you'll still skin ObjectBar in the general sense but the actual "cool" looking readouts can all be done via DesktopX widgets.

The other big change in ObjectBar 2 is an overall simplified way of configuring it. ObjectBar 1.6 (on Object Desktop) is very powerful but very complex to use.  ObjectBar 2 will also replace ControlCenter (there will be a ControlCenter "Theme" that gets included that looks essentially identical to the classic ControlCenter but has more functionality and configurability).

We hope you like what you see.  If you don't have Object Desktop, which is what ObjectBar is part of, you can get it at www.objectdesktop.com.

So what ever happened to that ObjectBar thing anyway? You know, the program in Object Desktop that had so much potential to really make Windows into a much more productive environment?

Click on the screenshot to find out. In essence, ObjectBar 2 is almost ready for beta.  One of the big new features in it is that it can incorporate DesktopX widgets.  So rather having to make the ObjectBar "skin" format insanely complicated for doing really advanced looking graph readouts and RSS feeds and all those other goodies people like to put on these kinds of things, users and authors will be able to simply select a DesktopX widget and put it in there. 

As any DesktopX widget/object author can tell you, creating custom looking content for DesktopX is a snap. So you'll still skin ObjectBar in the general sense but the actual "cool" looking readouts can all be done via DesktopX widgets.

The other big change in ObjectBar 2 is an overall simplified way of configuring it. ObjectBar 1.6 (on Object Desktop) is very powerful but very complex to use.  ObjectBar 2 will also replace ControlCenter (there will be a ControlCenter "Theme" that gets included that looks essentially identical to the classic ControlCenter but has more functionality and configurability).

We hope you like what you see.  If you don't have Object Desktop, which is what ObjectBar is part of, you can get it at www.objectdesktop.com.

You can't choose to have faith in something.  You either have faith or you don't. And when it comes to most religious issues the most faith I can manage to muster is the faith that there may be some greater being, some higher power that ultimately created the universe.  Beyond that, my faith is lacking.

My friends who have faith cannot understand this aspect of myself anymore than I can understand their ability to have faith in their particular religious choice. It's beyond me. I simply cannot bring myself to have faith in the teachings of any man-made theology. Nor can I accept that any of the theologies being presented are "divinely" provided.

For example, I fully understand the nature of Christianity. In fact, I'd argue I know it far better than most "Christians" I know.  Christianity boils down to this: If you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior then you will be able to join him in the kingdom of heaven.  It's as simple as that. If you truly believe in Christ, then you will be saved.

Not believing in Jesus as your lord and savior does not mean you go to hell. Not in the sense most people think of it anyway.  The bible is vague (at best) about the alternatives.  Having faith in Christ is simply you accepting an invitation to blessed path after the end. Not accepting that invitation leads to the unknown.  My point being, my problem with faith is not based on the oft-spoken issue of "What about the people who have never heard of Christianity? Do they all go to hell? Does that mean that everyone else is going to suffer?"  Because that's not actually what most Christian theologians believe. The alternative to the kingdom of heaven isn't eternal pain and torment. The alternative is unknown (though you can get into a lively debate as competing passages of the old and new testament, translated umpteen billion times get thrown back and forth).

But for me, faith in Christianity (or any religion that shows there is more to the world than the physical) is something I desire but am incapable of. It's that the specifics of each religion almost always fall apart on closer, objective inspection.

I know, for instance, that Jesus was not born on December 25th. At least, the preponderance of evidence is that he wasn't born on December 25th.  The date was simply put there after the fact by the early Catholic church to make it easier to convert pagans.  Easter is the same thing with its taking place conveniently during pagan fertility festivals. I've known this for years. But that wouldn't really disturb my faith. The actual dates of the birth and death Christ are arbitrary.

But things get more difficult when the preponderance of evidence indicates that the concept of "immaculate" conception of Jesus came much later (in fact, the books of Luke and Mark and such didn't even get written for decades after the fact). And the more you dig into the historical accuracy of Christmas the more the whole thing unravels.

Christianity, as a sect, really boiled down to something pretty specific at the beginning. Jesus was leader of a particular group of Jews. He was tried and crucified for sedition. Two days later, a number of eye witnesses claim they saw and spoke to him -- that he had risen from the dead.  And enough people believed -- had faith -- that this was the truth that everything eventually snowballs from there (with a big help of St. Paul who, btw, had never met Jesus in all likelihood). Like I said, the more I've looked into the specifics, the more it unravels.

For me to have faith in such a specific vision of religion would require proof. Real proof. And of course, that's the catch, proof denies faith. I'm not looking for a reason to have faith, I'm looking for proof and I know such proof that would satisfy me doesn't exist. You either have faith or you don't. And I don't.

Not having faith is nothing to take pride in. It makes me feel a bit ill to see some pretentious atheist try to claim intellectual superiority for his faith of believing that the universe just spontaneously came into being. That's a faith that has about as much "scientific" proof behind it as believing that the universe was created 6 seconds ago by 3 green fairies who gave us all these memories.

As faiths go, I would much rather believe that there is an omnipotent being that is concerned over our welfare to the point that he sent his own son to die for our sins to enable us to join him after we leave or mortal coil. That sure beats believing the universe simply sprang into existence and that after we die there is nothing.  But I have faith in neither belief.  Simply put, I don't know what happens after we die.  But I cannot have faith in the specifics of Christianity. I'm just not the faith kind of guy. I need evidence to believe something.

I don't think you need to have faith to be a happy person. Nor do I think you need faith to have a fulfilled life.  The home I live in is full of love and joy. There is no emptiness due to the lack of faith or religion in our lives.  But at the same time, I truly wish I could have faith because I very much want to believe that there is more to this world than what I can see and touch (or that others have seen or touched whose credibility I trust).  But I cannot muster that spark.

And so I can enjoy warmth and comfort of Christmas because of its earthly goodness due to the presence and love of friends and family. But I can't enjoy it due to its otherworldly meanings.

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.