Every do a favor for a friend or business associate only to have them not only not return the favor but nit-pick on everything you're doing.

That's how I'm feeling right now.  I feel like I'm volunteering time to help landscape a friend's yard only to have my friend sit there and nit-pick the way I'm digging or complain that I'm not going fast enough.

Except this is in the realm of business.  We have certain levels of custom service we're used to being able to provide to our customers but I feel thwarted in being able to provide any flexibility to customers because our partner is a control freak.  But that doesn't stop them from asking for tons of favors from us that we don't have to do.

Ack! 

Related to the call for skinners to upload their toolbar icons and progress animations, I want to share with you some of the stats WC2K5 will have for you:

These are my stats btw.  So someone claiming I'm not a skinner... There are tons of other stats like this in WC2K5. 

Right now we're rolling it out to admins and then in a couple weeks to WinCustomize subscribers (level 4 or higher) and then eventually on out to everyone else.  The whole site is being rewritten from scratch so it's been quite a massive undertaking. There will be medals and awards for skinners and for tutorial writers and article writers, and more. Stay tuned.

US soldier returns from Iraq with some advice to US administrations:
http://www.strategypage.com/onpoint/articles/200498.asp

Meanwhile, Kerry, who still hasn't disclosed his service record may be making himself open by yelling about Bush's Vietname service:
http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2004/09/kitty_kelley_an.html

Kerry, who now says that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time is borrowing words from Howard Dean. Of course, when Howard Dean said that, Kerry said that anyone who would say such a thing has no business running for President:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/587jxocg.asp

The Drudge Report has an article about Kerry holding a gun that he had tried to ban. I wonder if he told those sportsman that..
http://drudgereport.com/dncg.htm

In case you're wondering, that's a Remington 1187 . A gun that would have been covered in Kerry's "Assault rifles ban". 

It's hard not to conclude that Kerry's campaign is beginning to unravel. Americans don't like flagrant opportunists. And now, after months of accusing others of attacking his patriotism, Kerry is now doing just that. Whereas one might argue whether his patriotism was really being attacked (disagreeing with his senate record is not attacking his patriotism).  There's no question that talking about Cheney's deferrments in the 1970s is squarely aimed at making Cheney look like a "chicken hawk". 

The issue isn't that such charges on their own are unwarranted. But after months of whining about attacks on him, for him to turn around and blatantly do what he had just spent months saying was wrong is going to do Kerry real harm. 

Moreover, now that we've got the absurd "Texans for Truth" going around trying to charge that Bush was AWOL in Alabama or whatever, people are going to ask Cheney if he'll come out and specifically condemn that and demand its banning from the air.  Which is a loser situation no matter what.  If he doesn't publicly demand its withdraw from TV, his hypocricy quotient increases.  If he does go on TV and demand it be taken off the air, then he's using up precious days of coverage between now and election day talking about an issue that does him no good.

For those of you who have made WindowBlinds skins that also have toolbar icons and progress animations, PLEASE upload them as seperate items also into the toolbar section and progress animation section.

You'll be glad you did as in the new WinCustomize, there will be a leader board per section as well as being able to win various awards for being a top skinner in a given category.

But more importantly, we want to promote customizing ones progress animations and toolbar icon skinning and right now there's less than a dozen in those sections.

Thanks!

So now Kerry is trying to make an issue that Cheney got a deferrment for going to Vietnam? Are they seriously? Wasn't the last Democratic President an outright draft dodger? Since when is Vietnam war fighting experience a big deal to Democrats?

For those of you interested in trying out the game before you buy it, you can get a taste of what the game is like by going here:

http://www.download.com/The-Political-Machine/3000-8027-10312016.html?tag=lst-0-1

Have fun!

For those people who can't get their drivers updated because their hardware manufacturer isn't supporting them anymore for whatever reason, this site has helped a lot of people:

http://OMEGADRIVERS.NET

So to those who run into "Display cannot be found" or corrupted graphics or register dumps (blue screen) these are all because of faulty video drivers that can be fixed with updated drivers.  Go to your manufacturer's website first. And if you can't find updated drivers there, check out Omegadrivers.net.

StardockTV is a monthly on-line show that provides videos on various programs to jazz up your Windows experience.

This month includes a demo of the Oxidized Premium Suite, Super Icons, DesktopX Themes, ObjectDock plus, and more!

SDTV.Joeuser.Com

StardockTV comes back from summer hiatus with a line up of videos showing you how you can customize your Windows desktop.

This month:

Oxidized Desktop

Oxidized is a new premium suite and the first one to really combine a full set of themed widgets with a fully featured visual style and complete icon package. This video is a fairly basic walk-through of it. One thing about the widgets that should be pointed out is that you can hit a hot key (defaults are F9 and F10) to either activate the widgets (bring them to top) or to toggle showing them and hiding them.

	Oxidized Desktop Video
	Get Oxidized

DesktopX Themes

With the freeware version of DesktopX 2.2 released to the public, here's a video showing how you can use it to create entire desktop environments.

	DesktopX Themes in action!
	Get DesktopX 2.2

ObjectDock Plus

Last week ObjectDock Plus was officially released out of beta. While ObjectDock itself is a freeware download, there is no "trial" version of ObjectDock Plus. So here is a video that shows off how you can use ObjectDock Plus on your desktop.

	ObjectDock Plus
	Get ObjectDock or ObjectDock Plus

It's SUPER icons!

This month we're warming up our way to getting to talking about how to create widgets. These two videos show off the basics of DesktopX - the objects. Objects can be used to create widgets and themes. But they can also be used to simply put cool stuff on your desktop that is largely cosmetic.

	Super Icons Part 1
	Super Icons Part 2
	Get DesktopX

Next Month Preview...

We have a lot of cool stuff in the pipe line including The Natural Desktop, WindowBlinds 4.4, The RightClick beta, Desktop Widgets, and more! Stay tuned!

We hope you like the videos. To make them, we used CamStudio, a freeware program that lets you record your desktop. If others want to do demos of what they're doing with their computers that they think are interesting, let us know and we'll try to put them up for others.