The JoeUser.com media guide is now up. You can see what the advantages and features of JoeUser.com are.

If you're a CURRENT WinCustomize subscriber you will be able to make use of the new WinCustomize 2K5 home pages tomorrow.  This includes a domain name (i.e. joeskinner.wincustomize.com) along with pages that include your gallery, your articles, statistics on how many sites refer to your personal page, how many downloads your skins have in each section, your rank in every section, your ranking in # of comments, your average rating, etc.

If you're not already a WinCustomize subscriber, click on the store link above to become one or renew your membership from there as well.

Let me first say that I think The Sims 2 is really good as a game product. Great graphcis, great production values, great attention to detail.

But I don't seem to get it.  First off, it strikes me as unforgiveable that the game doesn't feature a "go back 1 day" type feature so that if a key sim dies (like the guy I've spent 2 days building up) because of a ghost or some other silly thing that I can go back and try to correct it.  Sure, it's not realistic, give me the option still.

Secondly, I didn't play the first one. I.e. Sims 1. So as a result, I don't understand a lot of what I have to do. The manual for The Sims 2 seems almost as if you are have expected to have played the first one.  For instance, throwing parties. A big thing in the game. Yet I have no idea what the key to a good party is. It suggests a buy a "bar". Where do I get a bar? I couldn't find one in my list of things (probably in there somewhere).

It is very addictive but it is just incredibly frustrating that a Sim can seemingly die for no reason.

Let me give you my first experience here with The Sims 2. I have no previous experience:

I load up the game and spend about an hour building my own family. There's tools to make it so you can have people that look like your real family and after a long time, I managed to get a pretty good visual representation of my family in there.

Within 2 minutes though, a fire breaks out in the kitchen. I click on the fire and choose extinguish. He doesn't do it and my Sim dies. (I later find out I have to click on the fire icon at the top left). I exit out and come back in to see if I can restart. Nope, my guy seems to be dead.

Okay, I start over. Rebuild the family (not quite as detailed this time) and get it going. Within an hour my kids have been taken away by social services because they didn't do their homework.  I try to get my kid to do his homework but he always says he's "not in the mood".  Where's the "Make kid do homework?" Did any real parents have a hand in this design? My kid never wants to do homework either but there are ways to force him to do his homework.

So again, I start over, rebuild the family again. I have my wife and I work and hire a maid and nanny. Once again, a fire breaks out and the nanny and maid die. I come home from work, call the fire department who put out the blaze. Within another 10 minutes, my wife and I are dead for some reason due to the ghosts of these two incompotents. I had nothing to do with their demise.

Remember, I'm just a newbie here. So I'm sure there's plenty of things I "should have done" but they sure didn't seem apparent to me and I design, play, and code computer games for a living. 

I recognize a great game when I see one and The Sims 2 is clearly a great quality game. But I'm just having a hard time getting it I guess.

Check out this article on the latest in the CBS memo battle. CBS apparently didn't do very much research into this story after all..

Has anyone noticed that the quality of WindowBlinds visual styles has improved lately? There's been some really great stuff coming from people like MikeB, Boxxi, and many others. With WindowBlinds 4.4 now out for registered/Object Desktop users, it's a perfect storm of good things for users (like me) who are really into this stuff.

One of the internal debates right now is whether to support Aero-style semi-transparencies in borders. We don't know how well it could be done without affecting performance. There's still lots of people who argue (incorrectly) that WindowBlinds is "slow" despite the fact it's faster than what's built into Windows XP.  I can guarantee that there's be some performance hit on all but the latest video cards for semi-transparent borders. It would be non-trivial to go and do this well. My personal feeling is I'd like to see shadows in WindowFX made more seamless. How many of you run with shadows on all the time? If not, why? I don't because I feel (maybe wrongly) that they slow down my computer. I think the first quest is to find a way to make shadows perfect as long as you have a high end video card that has proper drivers. That would be the proof of concept. I do agree that semi transparent window title bars and borders might be cool.  And I have no doubt lots of people would like the feature. The question is merely whether it's feasible or not.

Meanwhile, things are crazy at the office as usual. We're working on buying a building. Right now, we lease our building over in Livonia Michigan. But this Winter, we hope to migrate to a brand new building we're buying. We're very excited about it.  Once we're over there, we'll have more room to start hiring more peple.

Speaking of hiring, we're still in a bit of a world of pain in the art department. We really need a senior level 3D modeler, preferably one with some animation skills (i.e. someone with some serious experience). We have a fantasy strategy game in early development and we're really weak in the 3D modeling of organic things (trolls, orcs, elves, etc.).  So if you know anyone whose really good at modeling things (and I mean really good -- we have good modelers already but we don't have ones who are experienced enough to make convincing organic things fairly quickly) then have them email me ([email protected]).  And no, you can't work from remote (we get a lot of people saying they're happy to work with us, for lots of money, as long as they can work from home, we need someone on hand).

We're working with SkinPlant on a really cool new skin suite called Unorthodox. The idea is to create some truly unique looking skins that approach GUI design from new angles. We hope to have that done by October.  Meanwhile, Mormegil is nearly done with the Utopia icon suite. It's a sequel to his popular Orion icon suite. He's been working on Utopia for over a year now. It's a huge undertaking as there are so many icons in it and he has strived to create something both unique as well as something you'd want to use.  We're hoping that'll come out in October as well -- 2 years after Orion.

Next week, WinCustomize subscribers will be able to start having their own personal pages via the new WC2K5 technology. WC2K5 won't be done next week for subscribers, just the personal home pages. But I think a lot of it will blow people away. The amount of "stuff" there is, frankly, incredibly cool. By the end of September, the beta of WC2K5 will be ready for subscribers.  The full WC2K5 will be a pretty dramatic departure from the WinCustomize of today. It'll be a tabbed interface. Things will be context driven. So when you go to the WindowBlinds library, you'll see the most popular WindowBlinds skins and WindowBlinds authors along with the most recent discussions about WindowBlinds and WindowBlinds tutorials. That's what would appear on the right bar instead of the same stuff on every page.  From a speed point of view, things are really different. Right now, everything on WinCustomize is database drive.  But in WC2K5, there will be a lot of pages cached so that performance should be much higher. 

On Object Desktop, two new components are about to go into alpha/beta -- RightClick should show up next week and Web Explorer (think Internet Explorer with a tabbed interface and some other goodies built in). 

For those of you who have been living in a cave..

In early September CBS did a 60 Minutes story on Bush's National Guard service. The argument was that Bush got "special treatment" and "disobeyed direct orders". Did Bush get special treatment because of his dad? Probably to some extent. I don't think most people really cared.

But CBS apparently cared. Cared enough that to back up their story they produced a series of "recently unearthed" documents allegedly from 1973. The source for these documents were anonymous (why someone was holding onto these documents for 30 years wasn't explained).

The problem with the documents is that they're fake. But the worst part isn't that they're fake, but that they're obviously faked. The person who made these forgeries couldn't be troubled apparently to even change the default font of MS Word when they did it. Nor did they change the spacing. Or the tabs.

To get the same memos CBS presented, you can load up MS Word, type it out and low and behold, with the default settings it's exactly the same. Even if you use a different word processor (let alone a type writer) you won't be able to reproduce the document exactly by default. And no type writer (including the IBM Selectronic Composer) can reproduce these documents exactly. Only MS Word -- with its default settings.

Here's the animated GIF.  I'm pounding on this because CBS hasn't retracted their story yet. They're sticking to it which I find to be ethically repugnant. Instead, Dan Rather charges that their are "powerful, well finances forces" out there to discredit them.  No, just people who recognize a MS Word document when they see one.

Years from now I suspect they will be able to say that the Bush National Guard hoax on CBS's 60 News was the moment when "old media" jumped the shark. 

Jumping the shark is a term that refers to when something has passed its peak and is on its way down. It originates from a Happy Days episode where Henry Winkler as The Fonz, jumps a shark complete with leather jacket on.

Old media avoided covering Swift Boat Veterans where it could. Its controversial claims are considered dubious by some and with merit by others.  But this past week, CBS's 60 Minutes, which had ignored the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans had made against Senator Kerry, quickly, and apparently without sufficient consideration, did an in-depth interview on charges that Bush didn't complete his National Guard Service commitments.

The evidence for these claims largely came from a series of "newly discovered" documents allegedly written by now deceased Colonel Killian. Based on these documents, CBS's 60 Minutes gave significant air time to the claim that Bush didn't meet his National Guard duties and therefore has less credibility in what he says and does.

Here's a link to one of the documents: http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/pdf/BushGuardmay4.pdf

What is surprising is how transparent the forgery is. It doesn't take an expert to look at these documents and recognize Times New Roman font, the perfect centering of the address at the top, the curly quotes, Word's 1.25 inch margins, the superscript, proportional fonts, word-wrap, etc..  Not exactly standard issue in 1973 typewriters. I mean, you just look at this and it screams "modern word processor".

But it wasn't CBS that caught this error but rather the blogsphere.

Here are just some of the sites that quickly exposed this pretty obvious hoax:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/007760.php
http://www.indcjournal.com/archives/000838.php
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12537_Auto_Centering_in_1973
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=12526_Bush_Guard_Documents-_Forged

Already techs ites like www.Neowin.net and www.Betanews.com and many other such sites have taken over from "old media" when it comes to tech news.  But people have traditionally still thought that these web sites, these blogs, these "new media" lack the thoroughness and maturity that powerhouses like CBS News bring to the table.

And yet here we are, blogs ites and tech sites being right on top of things. It took until yesterday (Sept 14) for the cable news channels to finally start getting serious about this (i.e. taking a MS Word made version of the memo, printing it out, scanning it and overlaying it onto the alleged 1973 document). 

Increasingly, if you want accurate news quickly, new media seems to be the place to go.

Years from now, when Americans are mostly relying on electronic news compilation sources rather than network news to get their facts, people will be able to point out to this incident as the day old media jumped the shark.

"powerful and extremely well-financed forces are concentrating on questions about the documents because they can’t deny the fundamental truth of the story." -Dan Rather last night

The blogsphere is many things but well-financed is not one of them.

Note to Dan: Doesn't take a lot of money to open up Microsoft Word, type the same document with default font, spacing, settings, scan it and then overlay it with your "memos from 1973" to see that they match perfectly with the memos.

If CBS were correct, there's be a sub-story here - which type writer did MS Word use to design all its default settings for because CBS has apparently inadvertently stumbled onto that typewriter...

In a couple of weeks Blog Navigiator 1.0 will be released and boy is it cool. It's the only way I interact with JoeUser pretty much these days because the speed advantages of RSS feeds vs. slogging it through the JoeUser.com website are so apparent.

The only thing I can't do - yet - is navigate through the forums. But that should be rectified fairly soon.  But it's not just reading blogs, posting blogs is easy too. The posting part requires Blog Navigator Pro which will come out afterwards.

We've decided to make Blog Navigator freeware and then have the Pro version be the $20 one.  The difference between the two being the ability to create your own blogs. Blog Navigator Pro supports posting to pretty much any type of blog site too, not just JoeUser.

For other blogs sites, Blog Navigator will be a boon as well because we've made it so that you can customize the free version of Blog Navigator for your own site (complete with default links, product branding, etc.). Then the blogger can sell from their blog site the "Pro" version and get a cut.

As conceited as this is to say, I know of no RSS reader available, on any platform, that can compete with the features of Blog Navigator Pro.  Even the free version of Blog Navigator has few that are really competitive -- even its non-free competition.

But I'll be going through more of that as the release date gets closer. Stay tuned!

If you don't already have Natural Desktop, check it out at www.naturaldesktop.com. It's a new program that includes a bunch of natural looking wallpapers created by Digital Blasphemy with a sound track made by Mason Fischer with natural sounds and then has software behind the scenes to figure out what wallpaper and sound track to play based on the current time of day, time of year, and weather conditions.

It also includes a really cool animated weather portal (there's nothing like this anywhere, you have to see it to believe it) that displays the current weather and lets you control the various options in it.

Anyway, because it's been so much more popular than we had anticipated, we've decided to open up a Stardock news group for it: news://news.stardock.com/stardock.naturaldesktop. On there, you can post questions, get support, make feature requests, etc.  Since it's becoming so popular, we are definitely open to adding more features to it over time.