When we got married my wife and I had put a great deal of thought into important issues to us long before we had gotten too serious. We didn't enter into marriage lightly. I think it is for that reason we have had such a splendid marriage over the years. We rarely bicker and have few significant arguments.

When it comes to raising children, we bring very different life experiences to it. And boy are those life experiences different. Different to the point that it creates real conflict on what the best way to raise our children are.

I was raised by my mom. A single parent. She was a firm believer in discipline. I don't mean spanking but rather instilling personal discipline. Setting boundaries but at the same time providing a fair degree of freedom. That freedom was always tied closely with responsibility. Responsibility carries with it pretty big negatives for failure. You are free to make decisions but poor judgment would have negative consequences.

My mom and I didn't get along very well when I was a teenager because of boundary battles. But I think in the end I'm a better person for it. When I became a parent I finally "got it". That more than almost any other traits, self discipline and personal responsibility of ones actions are the pathway to success. Intelligence, ambition, charisma are all very helpful traits, but they are ultimately empty without being tied to having the self discipline to do what needs to be done and taking personal responsibility for ones life. That was what my mom was trying to do, instill personal discipline and personal responsibility to provide me with the tools to succeed in "the real world".

My wife's parents, by contrast, took the opposite path. They took the path of wanting to be their daughter's "buddy" rather than being the parental figure. In my relations with them, this works out pretty nicely as I get along with them quite well. If my father-in-law was my age, he'd be someone I would hang out with if he lived near me. But setting boundaries and instilling personal discipline were not their priorities. Their focus was to try to make their kids as happy as they could be. Unconditionally supportive.  Needless to say, my wife got along a lot better with her parents than I got along with my mom. On the other hand, I would say that as much as my mom and I disagreed, there are few if any parental decisions on her part that I would be ashamed to discuss with people. The same can't be said of some of my wife's parents' decisions as parents. But which is more important? The child's short term happiness or the child acquiring self-discipline and personal responsibility?

Of course, when you have children, which path do you take? The easy answer is to say "A little of both" but in practice that's really not practical. That basically would just mean I'm the "bad guy" and my wife would be "the buddy".  So we've struggled with that but we've slowly moved to the conclusion that it is more important to raise our children in such a way that we're providing them the tools to be successful adults and the two most important tools would be self-discipline and personal responsibility.

That doesn't mean we're our child's adversaries by any means. We love our children and want to provide as much love and support and nurturing as we can. But we also want to set boundaries, give them responsibility. We want to give them the freedom to succeed as well as freedom to fail in their endeavors and learn from those experiences. I want them to experience the rewards of success but also understand the consequences of failure or of poor judgment.

Self-esteem cannot be given from without. It has to come from within. There is no substitute for success. I don't mean success in a broad sense, I mean success in a given activity whether that be success at passing a test or winning a game, or helping another person. Self esteem is about feeling good about yourself. Feeling good about yourself has to come from within -- from personal achievements great and small.  To achieve one needs to have had the freedom to succeed as well as learn from mistakes. It takes self-discipline and personal responsibility to succeed.

What we want to do is teach them skills they need to be successful in life while at the same time providing them with a loving, stable, and nurturing environment. It's a daily challenge but one all parents must face.

Price points are one of the most challenging things in business to come up with.  At what point does something become too expensive for your target audience? It is something we wrestle with constantly. Raising the price decreases the number of buyers but not at a steady rate. The challenge is always figuring out the highest price you can sell for while maintaining the relatively biggest user base.

Sometimes pricing things too low can hurt you. People assume that a product or service is of low quality if it isn't within a certain price range.  So coming up with a good price is always a real challenge.

Over the years we've found these price points to be relatively strong:

$6.95, $8.95, $9.95, $14.95, $19.95, $24.95, $29.95, $34.95, $39.95, $44.95, $49.95, $69.95, $89.95, $99.95, $129, $149, $179, $249, $299, $499.

But not all of these price points are equally good. And their strength changes from product to product.

For example, Object Desktop, our company's primary product, is priced at $49.95.  We would prefer to have it at $69.95 but we believe that the user base would collapse.  $49.95 is something people will buy without too much worry.  At $69.95 it enters a different realm. The only reason we've been able to stay at $49.95 is because our user base has been so helpful in helping out on our forums with other users who have questions. Otherwise we'd either have to drop features or raise the price.

A more pressing one is our upcoming expansion pack for Galactic Civilizations.  We originally envisioned it being $19.95. That is a great impulse buy price point. The problem is that it's not likely to be widely distributed which changes the target demographic considerably.  So we've been playing around with raising the price to $24.95 or even $29.95.  But that price may actually decrease sales to the point where we actually generate less revenue as a result. So we're still agonizing on that.

The reason you always see .95 or .99 by things is because people, particular males, don't pay as much attention to the cents portion. Moreover, males are more likely to round down for some reason than females. Which is why you'll hear some guy say "Yea, it was like 20 bucks" with the wife correcting "It's $30" when the actual amount was $24.95 or $29.95.  But it's hard to say if that's still the case, that was from research back in the 50s and 60s and shoppers are much more savvy. 

We usually just go by our own gut reactions. Anything under $10 is basically "free". At that point it's more a matter of dealing with the obnoxiousness of on-line stores as well as factoring in whether what I'm buying is is "worth" the amount they're asking.  I'd feel stupid paying $9.95 for Q-tips. Same on skins. For some reason $9.95 on an icon package or suite seems just a tad too high. Yet $8.95 is fine even though it's only $1 less. So a lot of time you have to play it by ear.

I decided to write this article because I just couldn't find any good information or studies on the net about price points. The 19.95 to 24.95 difference is a big one for instance that many struggle with.

Feel free to share your thoughts and experiences.

Our friends at OSNews.com have pointed out an article that goes over the new features and fixes in Windows XP SP 2.

Check it out, it's a good read.

This is just unbelievable.  I am sure many fo you, like us, have dealt with plenty of machines that run fine 24/7 over years and years.

Today WinCustomize lost another server to total hardware failure. This is the THIRD server in 3 months. This one in some ways was worse and the timing was particularly bad.

The SQL database was on that machine. Luckily, because of our previous experiences, we have backups. But because of an additional glitch, the auto-backup didn't work which means we lost all the database changes since our last manual backup which was just before we left on the holidays. Net result is that we lost any uploads between the time we went away for Christmas (22nd?) and yesterday.

You can imagine how frustrated we are. Oh, we have a pretty good idea the commonolity on this (all 3 servers were quite very new, from the same provider with the same OS). But we won't get into public finger pointing. 

It's just incredible though. We have el-cheapo servers here that have run 24/7 for the past 5 years without any problems.

We'll have the libraries restored with what we have. If authors who have recently submitted stuff could resubmit their stuff we appreciate it and apologize for the inconvenience. Ironically, we have the files (the crash in November wiped out the physical files but the database was fine). I'm just glad we keep backups.

Thanks for your patience and support. Unfortunatley, we are now down a main server again. This one was our fastest/newest (and most expensive) machine unfortunately.

If anyone needs me, I'll be over here pulling my hair out.

This has been around a bit but it's still useful for those of you wondering how good your Internet connection is. ZDNet has a bandwidth tester that will give you an idea of how good your connection is.

My cable modem is through Comcast and tested at 1.665 megabits per second.

Ever wanted to set up your computer to be able to act as a Tivo? Snapstream Media's BeyondTV lets you do just that and with a decent system, it can do it incredibly well.

I can say, as an owner of a Tivo, and very happy with it, Snapstream has come a long way with their software to the point that it's pretty compelling stuff if you're interested in recording shows to your computer.

If you have Object Desktop, you can now try out IconPackager 2.49.  IconPackager is the world's leading program for changing all your Windows icons at once by applying "packages" of icons.

Version 2.49 has a ton of very useful features and fixes including:

1) Full integration with IconDeveloper (another part of Object Desktop). So now you can instantly jump to editing and tweaking icons directly.

2) Enhanced Previews before applying

3) More icons on Windows XP supported.

4) Smart Packaging, redundant icons (duplicates) removed so that packages are smaller.

5) .iptheme encryption. The actual IconPackager theme is now encrypted (not the icons, just the .iptheme file).

If you don't have Object Desktop you can get it at www.objectdesktop.com

Update: To get you an idea of how good the smart packaging feature is - on the icon package "Toon-XP" it went from 16 megs of disk space down to 11 megs of disk space.  That's 5 megabytes for the same icon package! That will save download times (and bandwidth) for everyone.

One of the more frustrating aspects of the Internet is also one of its strengths - it is the great equalizer. People from all walks of life can get together and debate about anything. It is frustrating because often times you find yourself debating on some issue you're an "expert" on with some high school kid who has no idea what they're talking about.

I will be debating a legal point or making a business argument only to find myself trading posts back and forth with some kid who is just plain clueless. They say teenagers act like they know it all. But the Internet has given them a venue to spout off their know-it-allisms to the world.  Many a time I'll be on some forum having just finished a 2 page response putting forth my argument only to realize that the people I'm arguing with aren't even adults. Doh!

Whether the topic be intellectual property law, capitalism, business ethics, politics, you name it, the net is full of people who will write passionately in response despite complete ignorance on the topic.  I've seen that a lot here on JoeUser, especially in the comments area.  People from the left and right will spout off, without even being aware of it, the "talking points" of the other side. Mindless parroting of straw man arguments and other idiocy is all too common on the net.

So let me rant out 15 points about nothing in particular that I've found are true but are often argued about by people who have no idea what they're talking about.

1) Capitalism isn't perfect. But it is the best system we have. Human beings act in their self interest and any system that wants to succeed on a large scale has to have a way of motivating people to do work that they may not want to do but benefits them and has the side effect of benefiting society.

2) All nations act in their own self interest but not to equal degrees.

3) The United States is the most benevolent leading world power in history. Pointing out its misdeeds and mistakes doesn't change that. Those who disagree need to look through history at other major powers and their actions.

4) Intellectual property law basically boils down to this: People who create things have the right to determine those things are used and distributed. Period.

5) Advertising will not pay for bandwidth intensive websites.

6) If you think George W. Bush or Bill Clinton are/were the worst Presidents in American history you should stop debating history and learn history instead.

7) If you think Democrats are all atheists or that Republicans are all devoutly Christian then you should spend more time looking into these things rather than spouting off on things you don't know about.

8) The Declaration of Independence is not a legal document.

9) Money can be exchanged for goods and services. Despite the wishes of some people, there is no referee who determines which jobs or careers are more worthy than others when it comes to deciding how much they get paid.

10) It is the state governments of the United States who perform nearly all the work that most people associate with what their tax dollars do (roads, schools, police, services, etc.). If you're arguing that the federal government should raise taxes so that it can do more "stuff" for the people you need to look at what the federal government actually does.

11) More people died and suffered long term from fire bombing Tokyo in 1945 than died/suffered from the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

12) If you have two people paying taxes and one of them pays 90% of the taxes and the other 10% of the taxes and you give both of them a 25% cut to their taxes, the first man will receive 90% of the overall benefit and the latter will receive 10%.  Any fair tax cut will always provide the greatest benefit to the ones who pay the most.

13) Nearly every major world leader has some involvement with a major power. Arguing that "evil man X" once received help or support from the United States is idiotic because odds are same evil man X also received support from other major powers in some way as well. Moreover, it ignores the fact that times change. The #2 beneficiary of all time in today's dollars from American military aid was Joseph Stalin (UK was #1). The United States sent hundreds of billions of dollars (in today's dollars) to Stalin in World War II. Many of those weapons, and especially trucks, were later used to do hold down Eastern Europe. That doesn't make the US complicit.

14) Nearly all weapon systems and other military material used by Saddam Hussein came from France and Russia -- not the United States.

15) In any argument or fight, it is rare that both sides are "equally" wrong. In fact, most of the time, one side is definitively wrong and the other side is right. Those who attempt to use moral equivalence arguments to describe both parties are more interested in looking noble than acting noble.

update: renamed title to 15 common topics instead of "facts" since that was what I was getting at.

It's important to set goals for yourself. Pretty much everyone knows that and yet so few people actually sit down and articulate specific things they want to do. Every New Years people come out with "resolutions".  Often times these resolutions are just not realistic. "Lose 25 pounds". That's easy to promise. But is it realistic?  I'm a big believer in setting bunches of very easy goals that take only a little effort.  I'd be the one to say "Lose 5 pounds" as a resolution for example.

So here are my big goals for 2004 for what it's worth:

1) Keep weight under 170lbs.  I'm about that now, want to keep it there.

2) Finish The Political Machine by May 30.

3) Get son Alex into a sport this year. Soccer, Baseball, something to teach him team work and sportsmanship.

4) Teach Alex how to ride a bike.

5) Try to get better organized in general

6) Get eyes "lasered".  I've had it with contacts/glasses.  They screwed up my new glasses by ordering the wrong lenses for the wrong eyes. And I'm getting increasingly tired of dealing with contacts.

7) Exercise 3 times per week actively.

8) Get basement "theatre" finished (i.e. actively save up to get it done)

9) Eat somewhat better. Not Atkins diet but cut down on carbohydrates

10) Take a vacation!

See! All of these are relatively painless or at the very least, not very difficult to accomplish.  That's why I am focusing on a set of fairly easy to achieve goals. Boring, mundane, but ones that will be either good for my family and friends or healthy for myself.

2004 has arrived and what an exciting year for skinning & customization it's looking to be.

I'm working on a State of Skinning: 2003 article presently which should be out in a few days.