Good parenting theory is the first thing that gets thrown out the window when you have kids. When my boys do something wrong, I know I need to discipline them. But how much? How often? In what cases?  It's always very tough. I look at their sweet faces and it's so hard to discipline them when they do something wrong. But I know, deep down, that the most important factor for success in life is having personal discipline.  Talent and intelligence can take you some of the way but without personal discipline they remain unfocused.

But knowing that and acting on that are two different things. I don't want to be the bad guy. I don't want to be an ogre.  And it extends way beyond punishing for wrongs too. The 7 year old's friends all seem to have an unlimited supply of toys. They're into these Pokemon cards.  Their friends seem to have an endless number of these things that their parents have gotten for them. We won't buy toys for the kids as a general rule unless it's birthday or Christmas. We expect the 7 year old to buy his own toys at other times with money he got for his birthday or money he earned doing chores. But it's hard when he looks at us with his sweet little eyes asking why he has to buy these things when his friends all get them "for free".

What's worse, I am not even sure if I'm doing the right thing. The other children around us are very good kids. It's just that deep in my bones I know that our children need more discipline in their lives. But it's hard to actually do it. But if we take the easy way now to make them happy today, I fear we'll set them on the path of limited happiness down the road as they are unable to achieve their own hopes and dreams due to being incapable of focusing on the task at hand and mastering the art of delayed gratification.

For those who are interested, I've gone through some of the more popular GUI Olympics entries and talked about what makes them special, why they might win, why they might not, and so on. Took quite awhile to do as you can imagine but I wanted to show how much energy the judges are putting into judging these events and show off some of the things about these skins that the casual user may not be aware of.

This is on the icons and WindowBlinds visual styles. If someone wants to write a round up of the favorite Winamp skins, let me know and I'll put that up too.

For those who are interested, I've gone through some of the more popular GUI Olympics entries and talked about what makes them special, why they might win, why they might not, and so on. Took quite awhile to do as you can imagine but I wanted to show how much energy the judges are putting into judging these events and show off some of the things about these skins that the casual user may not be aware of.

There's so much grreat stuff in this year's GUI Olympics. And much of it is a lot better than a screenshot or casual use can determine. I've been reading on-line as people root for the skin they think is "the best". But how do you define what is "the best"?  Many users are casually using these things (if at all) and making their determinations simply.  So I sat down with some (not all, just some) of my favorites and wanted to bring to people's attention much of the work involved on some of these along with other issues judges may look at.  BTW, I was about half way done taking screenshots when I discovered that I had WindowBlinds skinning only theme aware controls which, for some reason, turns off progress bar skinning. My apologies to those skin authors who made great progress bars whose screenshots are showing the default ones.

This is FlyOS visual style with PirateOS for the icons.. The first thing about icons that many casual users tend to ignore is the number of icons in an icon package.  Someone loads up mega-cool looking icon package that only has 50 icons in it and it may seem to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But as you use them, you start noticing that some icons aren't changed. I noticed this when running one of the best looking icon packages -- my .WMV files had the generic icon. Other common file formats didn't have custom icons.  Do these things matter? They do to me. How the judges of the GUI Olympics will consider these things I don't know (for the record, I'm not an official judge for the contest).

Anyway, getting back to the skins at hand. FlyOS is one I like because it's really usable. It's usable on many different levels. It has very good MDI buttons which manner a lot to me because I'm always dealing with child windows in my programs. It's bright and crisp and easily colorizeable which also makes a difference.   FlyOS also has a really nice set of toolbar icons and progress animations.  Again, some great skins were submitted that didn't replace the toolbar icons and progress animations. How much should that matter? I can't say. It would matter some to me if I were voting for "Best overall" because it is a matter of completeness.

With regards to the Pirate OS icons, it has 103 icons in there each with lots of different sizes.

Look at all the extra icons in here.

More here too.  When you open up your folders on your hard drive and you see that .PSD files get their own slick consistent icon you can really appreciate the effort that went into this.  It also supports both Windows XP and non XP platforms.

 

This is Mini-OS. It shares the toolbar icons and progress animations from FlyOS which is fine because it goes nicely here. This is a really really clean skin and it uses a couple of unique WindowBlinds features such as the one pixel borders and having a indention that is just where the title bar text is. As much as I like the look of one pixel borders, it does make resizing sometimes a bit tougher on apps that don't have a status bar. But if you're looking for a minimalistic skin this is one to seriously consider. I like it a lot.

This is FM by Gabriel. Gabriel has emerged as one of the power houses in the skinning community in the past year. He's moving close to reaching his zenith as a skinner in my view as his skins keep getting better an dbetter.  This skin has very good toolbar icons and a nice progress animation. The skin is both attractive and minimalistic.  I would probably prefer to have slightly more contrast in my skins but that's purely a matter of taste as many skins are garish and hard on the eyes. This skin is very easy on the eyes and very functional. Look at some of the subtleties in this skin closely -- look at the mouse over on the Start menu. Many skin authors tend to want to really make it obvious they skinned the mouse over. But Gabriel's subtle use of that feature helps give this skin a level of class that few others can compete with.

 

This is G-Pod (also by Gabriel) with the Flooter icons by DanilloOc. I really like both of these. G-pod has the best progress animation I've seen ever. The skin is very colorize able as well and I usually run it with green or blue tinting to it. It also has a fun use of sound in it where the buttons will say "Minimize" and such when you press them.

Flooter has 129 icons. Again I want to stress this: 129 ICONS! DanilloOc also took the time to tweak the icons at different resolutions.  Hopefully some of you can appreciate the level of effort involved here. So when the judging comes out and you think some icon package should have won, ask yourself this: 1) How many icons were in the icon package (i.e. how complete was it)  2) How many formats are included and 3) Did they tweak them at different resolutions or did they just scale from some huge image?

One of the things that frustrated me a bit was some people discounting the level of effort involved in making skins and icons.  129 icons means 128 different images that had to be imagined, put together as part of an overall theme, drawn, and then put together for different formats. Most of this work goes unappreciated. But I want those icon artists to know that the GUI Olympics judges do appreciate the level of effort being put in. I know that many of these icon packages have been talked about a great deal at Stardock and there's a lot of sadness that many of them won't get the kudos they deserve (there's talk about having Stardock "bonus prizes" to go to designers who we felt didn't get enough from their hard work).

Anyway, enough blubbering on Flooter. It's really well done. Probably the only thing going against it is that it's a bit monochrome but that's a matter of taste and DanilloOc uses color extremely well when he does.

This is Erik Holmer's Kewk visual style. It's quite complete with multiple styles for the Start menu. A very popular skin for those who like minimalist skins in particular.

This is Sektor. It is also by DanilloOc who made those fantastic icons. It's one of the best skins in many ways but has many things going against it as well. First, it's a dark skin which are harder to make than the lighter ones, especially in terms of usability because Windows developers tend to assume they're dealing with light colors. Secondly, the title bar, while animated with a pump (very cool) has its buttons pretty close together relative to their size.  And yet with those minor foibles this skin has the best use of sound in the contest. Most WindowBlinds skins don't make use of sound which is a real pity because sound can add a little extra class to a skin. Of course, poorly used, sound can be obnoxious. In this case it adds fun and doesn't get annoying.

The screenshot though doesn't do it justice. This skin has the best Start menu in the contest IMO. Outstanding use of animation doesn't slow it down but instead reminds people why they're using WindowBlinds in the first place. It's just so well done. Also, the progress animation is amongst the best in the contest.  Very well animated and fits in extremely well into the overall theme.

The icons, D3A, were done by Milosz Wlazlo, a heavy favorite because of the very high quality of the icons. These icons are so good that it's hard to deny their inevitable high standing in the contest.  On the other hand, there's only 71 of them.

D3A is quality all the way through but with  some of the competition having nearly twice as many it may be a close call. I have to say these icons are amongst my favorites (which is why I'm talking about it at all).  BTW, the skin in this screenshot is Boxxi's Vector 4 which was really a creative design that I liked a lot. A lot of the really innovative skins this year came from Boxxi but the creative event was extremely competitive this year which kept his outstanding skins from placing in the top 3 (and yet Boxxi's probably gathered the most overall points from judges from all his high value entries).

 

This is B0se's Opulence. A fan favorite and definitely a very clean skin. Probably one of the most usable skins in the contest. It doesn't have toolbar icons or progress animations which put it at a significant disadvantage in the "best overall" area. But its clean design, high quality, and good design put it up near the top.

Not in the contest but Judge's Milk, designed by Max Rudberg and ported to Windows by Kol and D'Blade shares a lot in common with Opulence. Opulence is clearly an original work and has done very well in the contest. For those who like this style of skin, Milk is one that you may like also.

 

This is Essorant's Pixel 8 skin. Doing an informal poll around the office, this is probably the most used skin in the contest. This screenshot doesn't really do it justice. It's an incredibly usable skin with good use of color and contrast that makes it more usable at multiple resolutions than Luna. It has a clean progress animation and very nice toolbar icons. It's really got everything going for it.

 

This is B0se's other entry in the GUI Olympics. VectorCell has been, in many respects, the star of the show. It won the best pseudo-OS skin and narrowly lost the best usable skin (it doesn't have a system menu icon on the title bar). B0se has won 3 medals already with 2 entries, an impressive feat.  I'd venture that this skin would be a sure thing for one of the top 3 spots in the overall category if it had progress animations and toolbar icons. Even without those things, it's magnificent design, good use of color, high usability, and originality put it in the running still.  In fact, this particular visual style is likely causing quite a stir with judges.  How much do progress animations and toolbar icons matter overall? Each judge will weigh things based on their own opinion. It is hard to ignore the effort involved in creating toolbar icons and progress animations too. No matter what happens, there will likely be riot no matter who wins. Next to Pixel 8, this is the skin I see most often used in the office. It is also, btw, the most popular skin in the GUI Olympics in download count.

 

Storm from Treetog is a good example of Pixtudio design in visual styles. Bold design, high usability, very good polish. It makes use of some animation. Has some sound in it. It also excels in areas that do matter but few users can appreciate.  One of the things that Treetog skins tend to do is not have "glitches". Lots of great skins look and run great but will have some bug or other in there that causes flakey behavior on some app. When someone says "WindowBlinds is buggy" what they should really be saying is "WindowBlinds running <skin N> is buggy" because it's usually some minor glitch in the skin that can wreak havoc with some obscure app. After all, when the format allows you to move the buttons anywhere, have borders any size you want, have title bars any size you want, if some parameter isn't set right problems can ensue.  The GUI Olympics skins have prompted Stardock to put a host of error checking features into SkinStudio 4.3 (to be released next week) to help notify the skinner of any potential issues.

Now, on the icon size, Mindless Puppet's insanely named icons are easily the most original in the contest. And the effort put into them is not obvious until you look closer.  Look at the screenshot closely.  Look at how the icons are different for different resolutions.  The 72x72 icon is not scaled down to 48x48 but instead is a differently drawn icon. And at 16x16 a different icon is used. That's attention to detail and quality that Mindless Puppet is renowned for.  And with over 103 total icons (not 98) pretty much everything is covered.

There are other icon design contests on the net but if you look at them, most of those icons only have a dozen or two icons in them. Try drawing one icon sometime. Now imagine doing 100 of those! For the GUI Olympics over 3000 icons.  For example, on one of our favorite contests, PixelPalooza, the typical icon set has only 10 to 30 icons compared to the 100+ you regularly see here.

MikeB's Airlock has two styles. One style won the most creative contest with the BeOS style title bar that appeared on the BOTTOM of the window.  This is the more conventional style shown here. This skin has all the major features going for it. Very clean, good progress animations, good toolbar icons. If I were to make any suggestions to this it would be in the area of color choices. I like my whites to be white. Anything that makes my actual windows not perfectly white can be distracting. On my computer, I've tweaked this skin to have slightly different colors. I'm not a big fan of this shade of blue. But it's overall outstanding design puts it in the running.

Rokey's The Last Order, are a front runner to win one of the top spots in the overall best icons. But the judges face a similar a challenge even here.  A casual user loads up these outstanding icons and can say "These are the best icons out there, it's no contest". They are so well done after all. And they are outstanding. But there's only 66 of them and they are all large images (very high quality ones mind you) rescaled and XP-only. Makes things for the judge.  The sheer quality of Rokey's icons will create a riot if it doesn't come in 1st (let alone the top 3). On the other hand, what do you say to the icon designer who created a brilliant set of icons in which there's over 100 of them, they support every version of Windows, and the author created by hand different icons for different resolutions?

Rokey's incredible The Last Order is a favorite amongst both artists and users alike. On the other hand, it only supports Windows XP and all images are high resolution images rescaled down. How do you vote? Wouldn't want to be a judge on that one! Talk about a tough call.

 

And then there's Treetog's Antares. It's an animation extravaganza. Incredible animation. Good use of sound. Multiple styles included so that those with lower end hardware can scale how much animation is in there. And on top of it all, it's a power user skin that's also immensely usable.

The icons, by vf, are the Megaton icons.  144 icons. That's over twice as many as are in The Last Order and these icons are of outstanding quality as well. Look at the attention to detail.  He also has individual icons for file formats like .BootSkin in there.

TIFF and JPEG get their own icons. No generic media icons. When you've got 144 icons, you're covering a lot of formats. And they're not done generically, they're done with attentionn to detail on every one.  It has only one major thing going against them which is also its greatest strength - they're black. Dark icons tend to be less popular than the traditional light colored icons most people use.  But again, make yourself the judge, how do choose between an icon package of this quality, with 144 icons in them that are all individually set up? One other downside is that they're Windows XP only. 

So here is a handful of some of my favorite skins and themes I've seen that are also favorites of other people based on what I've read on-line. This is by no means comprehensive but just writing this up has taken 4+ hours today so I'll have to stop here.

But you can see the challenge for the judges. How much do you weigh these different aspects? What hopefully comes across is that the judges do look a lot closer at these things than most users realize. And for the designers out there, we want you to know how much we appreciate the level of effort that you guys have put into this.  And we want you to know that we look at that. We understand what is involved and look for those things in the skins and themes.  Does that skin work on Windows ME? Does that icon package include icons for Adobe Acrobat files? Does the icon include separate images for 16x17 icons or was it a high resolution image rescaled down? Do the icons support Windows 2000? How understandable are they? How close are the title bar buttons together? Does the skin make it hard to resize? How well does the skin work at 1600x1200? What about 800x600? And so on.

More to come. Soon we'll have the user choice awards. And if I have time, I'll include some other favorites. And we want to thank everyone who has participated. Hopefully everyone will remember to keep in mind that while they may feel that their skin of choice should have one 1st instead of 3rd, that with over 150 entries, most designers didn't win any medals at all and every skin and icon package in the contest took a great deal of work (weeks and weeks of work). We thank everyone for participating and helping make our community a better place.

-Brad

Recently finished John Stossel's Give Me A Break. John Stossel is co-anchor of ABC's 20/20. It's his segments I have traditionally enjoyed the most because he's always struck me as being fair. He goes after companies, organizations, and even the government if they fit a fairly simple criteria: Are they ripping off Americans?

Stossel has been under fire recently which is something that took him a bit by surprise. He started out as being the guy who exposed all those seedy big corporations. The polluters, the scam artists, the fat cat CEOs. And by doing so won fame and praise from his peers in the media. He's won so many Emmy awards that he needs a couple shelves to hold them all.

But then something happened. He expanded to expose the pet causes of the left as well. He pointed out fraud in Medicaid. He started pointing out the dishonesty in some left wing groups. He showed corruption in the government. And suddenly he was branded a traitor and has suffered great abuse from the very same people who were once singing his praises.

One of the big themes in his book that really got me thinking was lawyers. His book exposes how both the left and the right (but mostly the left) use the courts to bypass the will of the people. Through lawsuits small groups and wield tremendous power. While a law requires a majority of legislatures to pass, a new legal decision only requires one sympathetic judge or jury. Fail once? Try try again until you get the judge who will  give you what you want.

He also points out how these events end up harming the people they're trying to protect. Big lawsuits over iffy claims of discrimination by the disabled or minorities has led to higher unemployment rates in those groups as companies become more wary about bringing in a huge potential liability.

But for me, the real meat comes into play when he shows how the media pushes stories that have little factual basis.  Take global warming, for example. Environmentalists have cynically been pushing that we're about to destroy the world due to higher temperatures caused by CO2.  But are we? In fact for most of the past 10,000 years the earth was warmer than it is today. The world wasn't destroyed then. And if it could be 3 or 4 degrees warmer say in the year 5000bc when there was no industry, how do we know that mankind is affecting the climate?

Where Stossel really stirred things up was a program on 20/20 that essentially showed the whole "Organic food" craze as nonsense. Essentially it boils down to this -- the trace amount of pesticides on non-organic food are likely to be less harmful than the massive amounts of extra bacteria that "organic food" has. Organic food is certainly no more healthy than any other kind of food. He includes interviews with organic food advocates that demonstrate that they too know it's no more healthy. It's a scam.

Stossel's take on poverty is particularly harsh. Stossel, the journalist who has made his career sticking up for the little guy has very little nice to say about government programs that are supposed to help the poor. Rather than helping the poor, Stossel argues that government programs help perpetuate it. 

For example, in 1959 the poverty rate was 22.4%.  By 1970 it was down to 12.6% just as the "war on poverty" programs were starting up.. But at 1985, when mean Mr. Reagan finally got through some of the elimination of "programs for the poor" the poverty rate had actually increased to14%. In other words, the  "war on poverty" had managed to reverse the historical trend in the United States of decreasing poverty. Poverty remained about the same until the mid 90s when welfare reform was passed. By 2000, poverty had declined to an all time low of only 11.3%.  Imagine where we might be today if we hadn't lost a generation or two of people to welfare?

Probably the most controversial part of the book (which is saying a lot right?) is the argument over what constitutes "doing good".  Do good intentions trump good results?  He compared Mother Theresa to Michael Milken.  Mother Theresa was the model of humility and devotion to the poor.  Michael Milken, by contrast, is the poster child of greed who gave us the term "Junk bonds".  But who did more good? Milken's junk bonds were what financed the creation of CNN, MCI, and hundreds of other high profile companies who have created millions of jobs and created trillions in wealth. Without junk bonds, Mattel would be out of business along with Revlon.  We're not even talking about the millions Milken gave to charities and education grants. Mother Theresa, while noble in intentions, actually accomplished far less in terms of helping people.

Regardless of whether you're left or right, Give Me A Break is a provocative, thoughtful read. Highly recommended.

One of the things that always bugs me is when people say things like "the truth is somewhere in the middle" between two parties.  I hear that kind of moral equivalence argument all the time. But where the heck does it come from because while technically true, in spirit it is not.

In my experience, when two parties disagree about some issue and have different versions of events, odds are that one of the parties accountings of events will be predominantly true and the other party's predominantly false. I talked to a lawyer friend of mine about this the other  day who has concluded the same thing.  In fact, as often as not, disputes arise precisely because one person is lying and the other person is telling the truth.

This got me thinking about falling outs between friends like the one I wrote in my friendship article. The events I described there aren't open to interpretation, those are the facts. Interpretation comes into play when deciding whether one party had a legitimate reason for feeling wronged or not. 

More recently, our company was involved in a lawsuit. I posted the facts as we saw them publicly which were pretty damning to our opponents. I did that because we believe in a very simple philosophy: If you practice your business honorably then you can operate transparently and the facts, when known, will always be to your advantage. But sure enough, a few people still said "Well, that's Stardock's side, I'm sure their opponents have a different take on things." My argument was that no, there wasn' t a different set of facts. There was only one set of facts.  If the case hadn't been settled, I would have been more than hapy to publicly post the complete transcripts (other than the parts our opponents consider confidential) from both sides from discovery along with affidavits from both sides.

This is doubly true when you bring things up onto the macro-scale. There is a tendency in politics to try moral equivalent arguments. It's as if it has become politically incorrect to take a stand on beliefs that are based on cultural roots rather than literal facts.  For instance, if party A believes that it is wrong for party B to kill their children and eat them as food in the service of their sun god, I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that party B is in the wrong. Yet these days there seem to be many people ready to jump up and say "Well, who are we to say..."

Great evil can be done because good people don't act. Similarly, great harm can be done if we take the easy route and assume that both parties in a given dispute are in the wrong.

Sometimes, there really aren't two sides to any story.

Feeling like there's a rut? Maybe a bit of stagnation? Well we do. And the cure has been not-so-quietly in the works for the past few months.  WinCustomize v4 (WinCustomize 2005) will start to be rolled out in the coming weeks piece by piece as the new technology gets implemented.

It's going to be a completely new site than what we have today.  Don't worry, all the skins and themes and wallpapers and icons will stay. But the way you interact with the site will radically change. It'll be much more community-oriented. Much easier to interact with one another. And much easier for non-skinners to contribute.

The first feature that we will be unveiling will be in a few weeks. The WinCustomize User Hub. Your personal web page with your own domain name (yourname.wincustomize.com).  From this site you'll be able to build your own site. If you're a WinCustomize premium subscriber, we have plans to put in all kinds of customization features to your home page that will enable you to show off your stuff, make recommendations, write articles and tutorials, and much MUCH more.

We will be putting in a great deal of new features to show more appreciation for skinners as well as open the door more for writers who want to expand customization into new areas. Ease of collaboration. Ability to submit or purchase premium content more easily. And overall turn WinCustomize into a much more interactive and lively place for its over million registered users and 3 million monthly visitors.

And it's all about to begin...stay tuned!

The final judged event of the GUI Olympics is the best overall WindowBlinds skin. The 3 best overall events (winamp, iconpackager, and windowblinds) will all be announced this week.

But let us know what YOU think. Which WindowBlinds visual style do you think is, overall, the best skin created for this contest?

Thinking about getting a HDTV? Check out this article at ExtremeTech before you take the plunge!

People who know me personally know that I'm rarely serious. In person, I tend to crack jokes and be jovial. I'm rarely serious about things -- at least on the surface. But one thing I do take seriously is friendship.

There is little I won't do for my friends. And my capacity to forgive slights (real or imagined) is pretty big. It takes a lot for a friend to get me upset because all actions performed by my friends tend to be filtered through my rose-colored glasses. 

The downside to this is when that friendship is not returned. One-way friendships are hard. If a friend gets mad at me, I'm inclined to assume that I did something wrong and must make good on whatever I did. As I've gotten older I've gotten better at recognizing when someone has a legitimate reason to be unhappy with me and when they're just being a bit narcissistic.

The biggest source of harm to my friendships has been my job. I am the principle owner of a small business. And when I was less experienced I thought it was a great idea to try to bring friends into the company. Bad idea. It can end badly.

One example of this that stings on a regular basis is when a good friend of mine joined the company. He was a great software developer and just a great guy to have around.  This was in 1996 when the company was riding high in the OS/2 market.  Unknown to us, the OS/2 market was on the verge of collapse.  By the summer of 1997, our revenue had dropped from millions per year to a few hundred thousand. We were dying.  The distributors and resellers who sold our software went bankrupt one by one owing us hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. 

Because my friend was so good at what he did, he was also well paid.  By mid-summer 1997 I told him, "Barring a miracle, we're going to have to lay you off by end of November."  We just couldn't afford him anymore financially. He seemed to understand at the time. And November came and no miracle occurred. So I had to lay him off. It was the lowest point in my career and one of my lowest points in my life. The company I had spent years building up was falling apart around me. It was the only time in my life I can say I've experienced real depression.

I thought I'd made the right business moves. We had made award-winning software but people weren't buying it anymore.  The market had gone away almost overnight.  Windows NT 4 had come out and our OS/2 market had swiftly moved to it leaving us with a set of products nobody wanted anymore.

And so we had to lay people off. My friend, because  his outstanding skills correlated to an equivalent salary, was one of the first to go.

Realistically, I should have started laying people off much sooner as the company was in desperate shape by summer 1997. I felt very guilty in having to lay off my friend and put my primary concern into trying to ensure that he had as much time to find new work (which he did fairly quickly since, like I said, he is an exceptional software developer). 

Since he was my friend, I wanted to make sure he was taken care of. So I made sure he had months of advance warning. And afterwards, I made sure he had a good severance package (that I had to borrow money to provide). I made sure everyone we subsequently laid off had warning and severance packages (just not to the same degree). Ultimately, nearly everyone else was laid off too pretty much in order of their salary.

The company ended up surviving on life support and by early 1999 we were starting to recover. Ironically, loyalty did save the day -- loyalty from our former OS/2 customers who were anxious for Windows versions of our software. Their pre-purchase of Object Desktop for Windows (sight unseen) provided the capital to keep going and turn it into a real product. But that was a ways in the future and we had no idea that day would ever come.

Meanwhile, my friend never forgave me. He and his wife subsequently made it clear that they would generally avoid anything me and my wife attended. We have the same shared group of friends so this tended to make things awkward.  And as my instincts tended to do, my view was that I deserved this. After all, I had laid him off and he had every right to be sore.  But it took a long time to realize just how sore he was.

As the years passed and he had quite evidently moved on job-wise and done well, the first tinglings of realization started setting in. We would invite him to birthday parties and LAN parties. We'd send them Christmas letters. Invite them to get togethers. And in return, nothing. No response. And he was clearly boycotting any event that I was going to be at with our shared friends. 

I think that last part, more than anything, brought me around to realizing that he was being unreasonable. I say that because if one of my good friends was having a get together and invited me and I was able to come, I would come regardless of whether someone else was there that I had a problem with (real or imagined). Because friendship should trump any sort of grudge or whatever.

It's not fair to put your friends into awkward positions of having to choose between friends. At least if it can be avoided. The threshold of pain should be high before you start putting your friends in the position of having to make choices.

Having given this situation a lot of thought over the years, I'm confident that no reasonable (or even remotely reasonable) person would conclude that my friend's experience was anywhere near the point to justify his reaction.  This wasn't a divorce or something, he got laid off with a near half-year notice and found another high paying job within weeks. Not exactly a trauma there. He wasn't wronged or misled.

It also started to bug me that this was a black mark against my wife and I.  Because no matter how you slice it, when person A is angry with person B, people are going to think that person B must have done something bad to person A to have earned their ire.  And having looked at things with the benefit of hindsight, my wife and I have concluded that we hadn't done anything to deserve this. And it wasn't until this year (7 years later) when they blew off our invitation for our 10 year wedding anniversary that my wife and I finally got really annoyed. Until that moment, we could easily have considered everything as "water under the bridge" and gone out to the movies together no harm done.

We didn't wrong him. We were good friends to them. The idea of arbitrarily throwing friendships away over unintentional slights is beyond me. Particularly without talking about it. Friendship is important. My wife and I enjoy being around our friends and hearing about their good fortunates and being there for them when they need us.

That's what friendship is all about, sharing your life and your hopes and your joy with other people who are doing the same thing. Love and friendship are the closest things on this earth to real magic. Each friend makes us better, richer, fuller.

And like I said, even with the benefit of hindsight, I can't think of anything I reasonably should have done differently that would have somehow appeased him. I was a good friend. I did the best I could. And there was nothing else I could do. His reaction and subsequent actions show that maybe he was never a true friend. I just don't see how a true friend would do this.

I suspect many people reading this have had friendships that were one-sided. Friendships where you were the one who had to always reach out to them. Or friendships where the "friend" sees things only from their own perspective without concern to how their actions may cause distress or harm to others.  I feel bad for those people because good friends, truly good friends, are the stuff that helps makes life great.

True Friendship is powerful. You feel excitement for their triumphs. Happiness for their good fortune. Sadness for their set backs. And whether you have only a few friends or many friends, each friend is invaluable and precious. And the loss of even a single friend is sorrowful.