Tomorrow I leave on a trip to New York. And so I'm here at work trying to do a bunch of things that need to get done before I got.  Naturally that means every piddly little technical thing blows up. Things that normally work fine go wrong.  I walk in the door and my car alarm goes off. I walk into my office and I get a good static shock. I turn on my laptop and get a blue screen. My copy of GalCiv 2 doesn't work on my laptop. Got a paper cut when shuffling papers around. Ran out of staples for the media guides. Dropped my cell phone on the ground. And Blog Navigator keeps crashing when I go to write this article..

Tast has written a series of guides on what you need to really customize your Windows desktop. Check them out below.

Essentials Part I: IconX
Essentials Part II: IconPackager
Essentials Part III: WindowBlinds
Essentials Part IV:  Logons

PC giant IBM is thinking of exiting the PC market entirely. The company the started it all is thinking of throwing in the towel after years of frustration in having to compete in an increasingly commoditized market. (Editorial: Perhaps abandoning OS/2 wasn't such a great idea after all, IBM...).

Full Story at News.com

We've updated some of our Holiday related DesktopX objects. You can use DesktopX to add these to your desktop. They're fully animated and help get your desktop ready for the Christmas season!

Download

For those of you looking for a fun little action game for the holidays, Stardock's game team has produced North Pole Showdown.  Check it out!

Download Northpole Showndown (free)

Welcome to Myth Inc. The Guild has finally gotten started.  For those of you who don't know me, let me introduce myself.  I'm Draginol in the game, Brad Wardell in real life.  I was an alpha tester and later beta tester on World of Warcraft so I'm fairly familiar with the game's various quests.

I also run this website (JoeUser.com) along with Stardock.com, WinCustomize.com and several other sites.  I'm a professional game developer having designed and helped program The Political Machine, Galactic Civilizations and a few other games. 

The purpose of a guild is for people to band together and help each other. Often times a warrior, for instance, may find a staff or some other item that is good for a mage.  Or a preist may find that perfect mace that they can't use but is good for a Paladin.  Moreover, Guilds are terrific places for people to easily form parties to go off and solve some quests, ask for help, and just generally help each other.

The name, Myth Inc., comes from a series of books from Robert Asprin if you are interested. The first book is called "Another Fine Myth".

If you need any help or have any questions, just ask here and we'll do what we can to help you out. Thanks for being part of our guild!

If you are playing World of Warcraft, visit us on Uther. Look for me, Draginol. You can also find other members Jeblackstar, Tandis, Stormy, and others who can bring you into the guild if you see them. Good luck!

If you're playing World of Warcraft, join us on the Uther server (Pacific time zone) to join the Myth Inc. guild.  Jeblackstar and Tandis are already on there and hopefully others will soon be part of the guild as well.  Hope to see you there!

Look for me Draginol or Tandis or Jeblackstar.

Here are the winners of the Fall WinCustomize WindowBlinds contest. These indicate the number of different subscribers who downloaded each skin. They share 5% of the revenue we collected during the contest time frame.

The winners are:

1. WindowsMAX 2	Steve Grenier	845
2. GT3	Tiggz	829
3. TriAX	brewman	529
4. Fabre	^^Gabriel	439
5. Skies	adni18	405
6. Carillon	essorant	404
7. Jarilo	essorant	400
8. CyberSkin	adni18	389
9. geo-Logic	I.R. Brainiac	353
10. Luster	MikeB314	337   Congratulations!!!!

What makes JoeUser.com special? There's zillions of websites on the net that let you have your own personal space to write down your thoughts and views on things. So why would someone choose JoeUser.com as their home for their blog?

JoeUser.com is a website that allows individuals to sign up for free web pages that include tools for easily adding user-created articles to their pages (blogs).  What makes JoeUser.com special are the features it has built in to enable users to get their blogs read by others.

JoeUser.com has a host of unique features that allow it to operate as both a blog site and as a news site:

·         Auto-Syndication. The Newest articles are automatically displayed on every JoeUser.com page

·          Peer review. Readers can give particularly well written article bonus points by rating it as “insightful”. High scoring articles automatically receive additional coverage and syndication on the site.

·          Home page featuring. Articles on JoeUser.com can be featured onto the site’s home page by JoeUser’s editors allowing the home page itself to act as an on-line magazine complete with multiple categories of stories on virtually any topic.

·          Audience Control. Bloggers have control over who can see their articles (just themselves, everyone, or selected users and groups such as friend and family only).

·          Blog Groups.  Users can band together and form blog groups in which the combined articles of individual members form the content of a new blog site within JoeUser.com.

·          Sub-Domains. Each blogger receives their own sub-domain such as Frogboy.joeuser.com.

·         Per-Article statistics.  Users can see how many people have viewed their article, what websites are linking to their article and even directly jump to the pages that are linking to them to see what they are saying.

·         Forum Syndication.  Blogs can optionally be syndicated to various forums on JoeUser.com, PoliticalMachine.com, TotalGaming.net, WinCustomize.com, and elsewhere depending on the content.

·         Popular blog site and article tracking.  The top blog sites, top articles and top bloggers are automatically listed on every page so that as users gain popularity through their articles, they continually gain additional coverage.

·         Blog Ranking. Users are able to see where their blog ranks amongst the tens of thousands available to see how they match up.

JoeUser.com is completely free to use, has no pop-up advertising, and is easy to use.  When you write your blogs on JoeUser.com, odds are other people will read them. They get syndicated onto every site. It is designed so that each user's articles have a chance of being read by others. The users who write articles that get the most points receive more coverage across the site.

That is the JoeUser.com difference, your blog is more than just an isolated personal page. It's part of a community too. It's a place where you can share your views and opinions and thoughts with the world in such a way that the world will see it.

Next week WinCustomize 2005 launches and it's a complete redesign of the current site. Cleaner, faster, more features, and a new look. This video (which requires Windows Media Player 9 or later) will take you on a tour of the features of the new site.