When you're dealing with the lower end of the intellectual spectrum, Democrats and Republicans tend to become pretty similar.  Their reasons for voting are often equally uninformed or irrational.

At the higher end though, there is a distinct difference based on what I've seen.  Democrats tend to rely much more on third party analysis for their political opinions.  It's pretty rare to see the "stats freaks" arguing for liberal or Democratic positions.  Instead, the Democrats tend to be much more inclined to quote a source they "trust".  One might call this lazy political intellectualism or another might put it as efficient use of analysis.  But no matter how ou slice it, these Democrats are only as good as their trusted analysis sources.

On the other side, Republicans, and particularly conservatives, tend to be much more inclined to NOT trust those who do analysis (again, at the higher end of the intelligence spectrum here, "ditto heads" on the right are no different that the Moore-ons on the left in their political IQ).

The stats freaks, the ones who actually skip the analysis and go look up the actual statistics or the actual original report are almost always Republicans or at least conservatives. This isn't necessarily a better way.  It can be time inefficient and lead to wacko conspiracy theoris when a right winger starts drawing strange conclusions form the data.

The Windows Media Player team still just doesn't get it.  Or maybe they get it but their managers don't. I'm playing around with Windows Media Player 10 tech beta and it still has the basic flaws that every skinnable version of media player has had: It can't decide what it wants to be.

Is it a regular Windows app or a custom one? Wow, two title bars on one app. And it's still confusing to a dumb guy like me how to actually select the skin. It should be way more obvious and those skins should affect the main app as well.

I keep finding myself back with iTunes even though it's technically not skinnable because at least it knows what it is. And as a practical matter though, it IS skinnable. 

If you have the DesktopX 2.2 beta (available to those who have Object Desktop) just download the widget and you can just run it as a regular program.  This is the part of DesktopX Stardock needs to really beat into people -- widgets don't have to be run as part of the DesktopX environment.  You can install DesktopX and NEVER run it. You can just load up widgets like any other program. The widget infrastructure in DesktopX is pretty ingenious, it works basically as if you installed an OS upgrade framework. It's more akin to the .NET framework except it's much smaller and more targeted and has no overhead and it doesn't throw anything into your Windows directories. It's very self-contained. That will be the drum we'll be beating loudly when DesktopX 2.2 comes out.  DesktopX widgets are EXEs. You run them like any other program.

Meanwhile the WinCustomize V4 stuff is coming along.  At launch, each WinCustomize subscribers will be able to activate a home page. Amongst all the other goodies such as being able to upload personal images (albums) the site will track all kinds of stuff for users.  Eventually Object Desktop users will also be able to activate home pages once we roll it out (i.e. having a WinCustomize domain will become part of the benefits for having an Object Desktop subscription as well but at first it'll be available only for WC subscribers).  WinCustomize subscribers will get personal libraries to upload many more personal images. 

Here are some of the incidentals:

Basically we will be doing a lot to try to give kudos to people who contribute to the community.  As you can imagine, all these statistics and other technologies will require a lot of horse power. Which is why subscribers will get first crack at using all this and why we're doing it all in .NET.  The development team has come up with a sort of multithreaded architecture for WinCustomize 4's .NET portions.  For instance,  normally when something gets uploaded or changed you have to wait for everything to be saved before continuing.  Now, the site will come back to you instantly while it does its work in the background.  We won't have the forums in .NET right away but that'll be where you'll see the benefit the most.  Well, that's not really true, the biggest places you'll see it is in commenting on skins.

You'll notice that there's a lot of kudos for people who comment on skins.  Those will come in the form of commenting points.  Moderators will have the ability to tweak those points (i.e. if someone is spamming the system we'll be able to tweak it or if someone leaves really high quality comments we can boost their points too but in either case it'll only be in extreme cases, we won't generally be touching points ourselves but rather letting the system do its job).

The look of the site is going to be totally different than it is today (and that screenshot isn't necessarily what it will look like).  Paul Boyer and the rest of the Stardock graphics design team are going to mockup what they imagine the perfect steam-lined but aesthetically pleasing looking content intensive site would look like and then the coders will run with it. BTW, for those who made it this far, as a little sneak peek, IconX is available.

Meanwhile, in the personal tech support area, in IE, my edit menu item is grayed out even though I use Front Page as my editor. No idea why it's no longer working but definitely very annoying. If anyone has any ideas (and I've checked in tools-options and Front Page is associated) comment here please.

The Windows Media Player team still just doesn't get it.  Or maybe they get it but their managers don't. I'm playing around with Windows Media Player 10 tech beta and it still has the basic flaws that every skinnable version of media player has had: It can't decide what it wants to be.

Is it a regular Windows app or a custom one? Wow, two title bars on one app. And it's still confusing to a dumb guy like me how to actually the skin. It should be way more obvious and those skins should affect the main app as well.

I keep finding myself back with iTunes even though it's technically not skinnable because at least it knows what it is. And as a practical matter though, it IS skinnable. 

If you have the DesktopX 2.2 beta (available to those who have Object Desktop) just download the widget and you can just run it as a regular program.  This is the part of DesktopX Stardock needs to really beat into people widgets don't have to be run as part of the DesktopX environment.  You can install DesktopX and NEVER run it. You can just load up widgets like any other program. The widget infrastructure in DesktopX is pretty ingenious, it works basically as if you installed an OS upgrade framework. It's more akin to the .NET framework except it's much smaller and more targeted and has no overhead and it doesn't throw anything into your Windows directories. It's very self-contained. That will be the drum we'll be beating loudly when DesktopX 2.2 comes out.  DesktopX widgets are EXEs. You run them like any other program.

Meanwhile the WinCustomize V4 stuff is coming along.  At launch, each WinCustomize subscribers will be able to activate a home page. Amongst all the other goodies such as being able to upload personal images (albums) the site will track all kinds of stuff for users.  Eventually Object Desktop users will also be able to activate home pages once we roll it out (i.e. having a WinCustomize domain will become part of the benefits for having an Object Desktop subscription as well but at first it'll be available only for WC subscribers).  WinCustomize subscribers will get personal libraries to upload many more personal images. 

Here are some of the incidentals:

Basically we will be doing a lot to try to give kudos to people who contribute to the community.  As you can imagine, all these statistics and other technologies will require a lot of horse power. Which is why subscribers will get first crack at using all this and why we're doing it all in .NET.  The development team has come up with a sort of multithreaded architecture for WinCustomize 4's .NET portions.  For instance,  normally when something gets uploaded or changed you have to wait for everything to be saved before continuing.  Now, the site will come back to you instantly while it does its work in the background.  We won't have the forums in .NET right away but that'll be where you'll see the benefit the most.  Well, that's not really true, the biggest places you'll see it is in commenting on skins.

You'll notice that there's a lot of kudos for people who comment on skins.  Those will come in the form of commenting points.  Moderators will have the ability to tweak those points (i.e. if someone is spamming the system we'll be able to tweak it or if someone leaves really high quality comments we can boost their points too but in either case it'll only be in extreme cases, we won't generally be touching points ourselves but rather letting the system do its job).

The look of the site is going to be totally different than it is today (and that screenshot isn't necessarily what it will look like).  Paul Boyer and the rest of the Stardock graphics design team are going to mockup what they imagine the perfect steam-lined but aesthetically pleasing looking content intensive site would look like and then the coders will run with it. BTW, for those who made it this far, as a little sneak peek, IconX is available.

Meanwhile, in the personal tech support area, in IE, my edit menu item is grayed out even though I use Front Page as my editor. No idea why it's no longer working but definitely very annoying. If anyone has any ideas (and I've checked in tools-options and Front Page is associated) comment here please.

So Kerry hasn't gotten much of a bounce from his convention.  Is that a surprise? How many people are undecided at this point anyway?

I just don't see how Bush can win, however.

Consider this: IF Bush gets the same % of the female vote and the % of the African American vote that he got last time, he'll lose by 5 million votes.

Does anyone here seriously think that there's a chance in hell that Bush is going to improve his stance with women and blacks in this election?

The official release date for The Political Machine is August 10. Just a little over a week from today.

Stardock & Ubi Soft are also working on the "BonusPak" (1.01) for release at the same time.  For those who are familiar with Stardock games, Stardock attempts to release a free update to its games that add new features as a way of thanking users for buying its game.  These updates aren't bug fixes (i.e. while there are "bugs" fixed in the update, it's unlikely anyone will run into any of them and none of them are significant).  The new features including a multi-game save game system and a lobby server for multiplayer. 

The multiplayer aspect of the game got a boost during gamma when we found that the multiplayer part of the game was far FAR more fun than we had ever anticipated it would be. So we decided to focus more attention on that aspect of the game.

For those of you who have pre-ordered the game on CD, it will be shipped to you prior or on that date.  Users of TotalGaming.net or others who pre-ordered the electronic version will be able to download the final game (which changed a great deal from the beta version) on August 10.

To clear up any pricing quesitons: The SRP of The Political Machine is $19.95.  The version sold on PoliticalMachine.com is $29.95.  That is $19.95 + the Political Operative's Kit which includes editors for creating your own campaign issues and creating your own interview questions.  User created issues and interview questions will be able to be uploaded to the library (which will be in the download area).  Users who don't have TotalGaming.net or purchased the game at retail will be able to get the political operative's kit for $10 later on.

The other benefit of the political operative's kit is that those users will be able, after January 1, 2005, migrate to electronic management of the game. That is, you'll be able to download the game from Stardock Central so even if you lose your CD in the future, you'll be able to redownload the latest/greatest version.

Kerry is demanding Bush implement the 9/11 commissions's recommendations immediately. This should scare you. Why?

Because under the commission's design, the new intelligence czar would be part of the President's cabinet and have an office in the white house.  You sure you want that?  You sure you want some combined FBI/CIA master ultra intelligence czar to be working in the white house with relatively little oversight? Because that's what Kerry is demanding. 

Bush, by contrast, seems to be taking a more measured approach. Today he announced the support of the creation of a director of all intelligence but does not want it to be in the President's cabinet nor have its office in the white house.  A pretty prudent move I'd say.

One has to wonder about the ethics of a man whose constinuents are paranoid about Ashcroft but is now pushing to rush the implementation of something that could, in the hands of the wrong man, be something that could do real harm to freedom in America.

When the ACLU and George W. Bush are on the same side on something, that should tell you something.

Had a great weekend at my uncle's. I took my telescope which is a Mead ETX 125. I can never get the results with it that I see on-line.

After a lot of setup, I managed to see Jupiter and its moons. But let me be clear on what that means: Jupiter is a dot and its moons are tiny dots by it.

I am using the equipment that came with it which is the 73 magnification lens that came wiht it.  I don't have a "Barlow" lens yet which I suspect I need to get that to have any real luck.

The problem really I have with on-line photos of user experiences is that they're nearly all touched up. There are various techniques such as sampling (stacking) hundreds of images together.  No. I don't care about that. I want to know what I will see when I look through the lens.  The ETX 125 is a $1k telescope so I really want to know what I'm going to see with it.  Not what I could, hours later, see on the computer. At that point, I might as well just download an image.  For me, and my kids, the whole point is looking in there and seeing all this cool stuff.

I've also not had terrible luck with the auto finder.  I'll painstakingly sync it up and then go to some common star only to have it get close but not close enough to be useful.  For instance, if I take the time to sync it to Arcturus or Polaris or some other star, I expect to be able to tell it to go look at the Moon and for the motors to get pretty centered on the moon.  Instead, it gets..kind of the right way but the moon is not centered. Maybe I'm doing something wrong as I'm new at that sort of thing but it's pretty frustrating.

But for me and the family, being able to see Jupiter's moons, even if they were dots, was pretty cool. So I don't want to make it sound like we didn't have fun.  Plus a good bonfire and smores and great conversations with my aunt, uncle, cousin, etc. make it all worth it anyway.

But anyway, if you're a newbie amateur astronomy wannabe like me, don't get your expectations too high when you plunk down the bucks for these things. It takes a lot of patience and meticulous setup to get the most out of a telescope -- regardless of its size.

I spent a lot of the day getting DesktopX 2.2 objects put together and testing.  I'm trying to get DesktopX to respect it deserves. Here it is, the world's best, most flexible, lowest overhead, fastest, easiest to use "widget" creation application and yet there's still people anxious for Konfabulator for Windows or using Avedesk (which is nice) or Samurize or something else. So I've started assigning more engineers into creating content for it so that its coolness is more apparent.

But it'll still be another two weeks before it's ready for public release. Hopefully by next week it'll be ready for Object Desktop users and registered users.  But clearly we have some work ahead of us to get people to migrate to its fully.

I also worked on the IconX page.  It's not publicly available yet and the page isn't done yet. But it's getting there.  At least today I was able to work on this stuff at home which is nice. Took an afternoon walk with my wife and boys around the block. It was muggy out but still decent walking weather.  Came back to work on the web pages some more.

Rewrote: https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/brief.asp and https://www.stardock.com/products/desktopx/infoguide.asp to hopefully be a lot more to the point that the last versions.  Previous guides to DesktopX would talk about OpenDoc and Taligent and such.  I suspect that I'm about the only one left that still even cares what Taligent is. A couple years ago I was offered the domain Taligent.com but they wanted something like $2k.  I was too cheap for that. I still think Taligent is a cool name. Pity nothing ever came of it.

Played some Spider-Man 2 for the Gamecube.  I hate to say it but I guess I don't get it.  The reviews say it's a great game but I just don't see very much game there.  It's not nearly as interactive as I'd like and the controls make my hands hurt.  It also has the abominable jumping puzzles that drive me insane.  I'm at the part where this guy wants to prove Spider-Man isn't a real superhero and I'm having to go through this moving maze while avoiding his zap gun.  I don't know what's worse, that I'm 33 and playing a twitch reflex game like this or that the game's controls are incredible sluggish for this kind of thing.

Been monitoring some of the bickering on JoeUser.  Good grief, some people just live to be nasty to others. They need to get lives. Others need to not take politics so seriously.  I enjoy a good debate of politics, as many of my articles are on that.  But I am not passionate on it at all.  Or I should say, I'm as passionate about politics as I am at playing Rise of Nations multiplayer. I enjoy it but I'm very mindful that since I've not been appointed emperor of the world (yet) that my opinions and those of those who disagree really have no bearing in the real world. 

That isn't to say that I don't find people who can't put together a coherent extremely annoying.  Nor do I enjoy the company of quasi-intellectuals who confuse arrogance with intelligence and their opinions for facts.  I had one Canadian claiming today that the US didn't truly own California because Mexico never signed the treaty.  To which I say A) Huh? Who cares? and C) Feeling bad for Mexico losing territory is like feeling bad for a car jacker who subsequently gets car jacked themselves.  Canada, USA, and Mexico all stole/conquered its territory from the native inhabitants of North America. The US was slightly better at stealing the land than Mexico.

So tomorrow the wife/kids and I are going to my uncle's with my cousins. Very excited about that.  I'm bringing the telescope so that hopefully, out in the country, we'll be able to see stuff.

While visiting NASA, John Kerry posed for the cameras and Nasa put the results up.

Kerry, who apparently found the pictures unflattering, cried foul. And he cried foul loud enough to gain the attention of the national media and bloggers who turned a picture that nobody would likely have seen into one everyone is going to see.

Sometimes, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.