Paul Boyer, better known as Mormegil, has created a holiday IconPackager theme to give your Windows icons some holiday cheer. Check them out.

Yesterday we had a LAN party at the office and played Counterstrike all day. It had been about 3 years since I last played and my skills were definitely rusty. My "ownage" ability had definitely taken a few steps down.

But it was still a blast. Though, it is always interesting to see a bunch of 30 somethings revert, just for an instant, to being a teen whenever someone makes a mistake (myself included). We had friendly fire on and I don't think there was anyone who didn't kill their own teammate at least once as well as get killed by their teammate. I tallied killing my own teammate 4 times in the 12 hour marathon and being killed by teammates 7 times. And boy were people mad when they got shot by a teammate. Ironically, out of the 8 people playing, my 4 friendly fires involved only 2 people so it wasn't spread out. Note to selves: Turn out friendly fire damage for next time.

But the game itself is still just great. And on the latest machines, 100+ frame rates are no sweat at all making the entire experience smooth. There was much praise of Valve's "Steam" technology which let us easily get updates and stay in sync. Though, all bias aside, Stardock Central (www.sdcentral.net) is far superior as a technology for getting updates and dealing with retail installs. But I digress.

I wonder if Half Life 2 will be able to have anywhere near as good an experience as Counterstrike with HL1 has. I think much of the enjoyment is the incredibly good performance. The graphics are dated but the massive framerates, excellent play balancing, and flawless play make the game just incredibly enjoyable.

A friend of mine sent me an email that showed the results of Google manipulation with regards to George W. Bush. In this case, a bunch of people go together and linked the words "miserable failure" to the biography of George W. Bush.  So now if you go to Google and type in "Miserable Failure" the first link is George W. Bush.

It's an amazingly petty thing to do and also very easy. I could do the same thing by using my access on several popular websites to link say Total Loser with http://www.deanforamerica.com/.  Do it on say 5 or 6 different pages and within a few months Total Loser will be affiliated with Howard Dean. Gee, clever.

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Meanwhile, over at Right Wing News, there's an article about how a student got expelled for having Advil in her purse. Advil. Part of their zero-tolerance policy.  If there was a better example of why public schools need competition from the private sector this is it.

I'm sorry but I've met a lot of "educators" over the years and generally speaking, they were barely average in intelligence. I had some truly outstanding, gifted teachers and have a neighbor who is a teacher who strikes me as very intelligent. But they are the exception, not the rule.

Public schools suck. Most people know that. The only ones who seem interested in keeping them from having to compete are politicians who put their kids in private schools. I guess the peasantry doesn't deserve any better.

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Despite what Dvorak seems to think, there are a lot of bloggers out there.  We're working on what we hope will become the definitive RSS reader. We're taking a bit different approach with it than the other readers I've seen in that we're going to try to make it very interactive over time.

But still, there are just so many blogs out there.  There's a contest on best blogs.  There are lots of really great blogs out there. It would be cool if ours can make it into some of those categories next year. Part of me wonders how much of these various contests are good old boy networks. For instance, if JoeUser's Alexa rating is in the top 10,000 next year in overall websites with 2 or 3 sites carrying most of the load, I'll start to really wonder if the "old guard" blogs are really more about patting themselves on the back while ignoring newer blogs. I'm probably being paranoid.

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You know what would be a nice feature? Auto-blog rolling. Here's how it would work: A blogger can request to be blog rolled by your site. They go into a database. A special referrals page is created called "Blog Rolls". Sites that send you referrals automatically show up in that blog roll. Now, most blogs here don't have enough referrals to make it worth it yet. But I wonder how hard it would be for us to actually do the work for other sites. Our auto-referring system here seems to be a feature I haven't seen on other sites. Instead, they have that nasty "track back" stuff which is much harder to use in my opinion.

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Good article on One Hand Clapping about how the Geneva Accords are a joke. The basic problem is that right now, that Israeli's and Palestinians don't want peace. Both have to want peace and right now neither do. I suspect that will change when the Palestinians finally wake up one day and see the security fence done and Israel implements a peace solution of its own that the Palestinians have no say over.

People say that the security fence won't work. I disagree. While you can never eliminate terrorism completely in that environment, you can make it a helluva lot better than it is now. I don't have a lot of sympathy for the palestinians or any people who use their youth as rounds of ammunition in a war.

The Simpsons were trying to make fun of the French in the episode where Lisa is Joan of Arc and finds the French catapulting their own soldiers at the enemy's walls. But the irony is, the Palestinians actually do use their people as rounds of ammunition. The only people who have made it a policy to do the modern equivalent of catapulting live people at the enemy.

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Also on One Hand Clapping is an article that points out the insanity of General Clark's tax position. Amongst many things Clark said, the thing he says about income is crazy:

        I've talked to a lot of wealthy Americans, and, you know, when you're making above a certain income level, those extra monies, they buy you security, they buy you options, but they don't buy you the necessities. ...

I tend to consider security a necessity. Financial security or otherwise. Clark really has become a true Democrat in that sense. Sure, an income >$100,000 (like Clark states) will buy you financial security but that's not a necessity when you believe that the government should be the one who takes care of you from cradle to grave. No thank you, I prefer the concept of where I provide the necessities for my family which includes being financially independent -- not needing politicians to take care of me.

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One feature JoeUser badly needs is for it to let us choose between having our handle or our real name used. I don't like my handle being used as my name for my blogs. I'm Brad Wardell. I don't want people to think I'm hiding behind some pseudonym.

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Standard feature blogs should have (that JoeUser.com does have) is having a printer friendly mode. I like to read blogs from bed. I'm a paper type.

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Ed Driscoll's blog today has a great observation about Gary Trudeau. The full article can be found here on Udolpho.com. Actually, I think the issue about ideologues slowly moving further and further in a given direction is inevitable.

On Usenet, people who advocate things (whether that be Macs, OS/2, Open Source, whatever) slowly become more extreme over time. That's because there are always extremists on the other side to pound on you for every opinion. I tend to think that negative feedback drives people more in the opposite direction faster than positive feedback does.

From personal example, I'm openly hostile to open source largely because open source advocates, almost always people who are users of open source, not people actually contributing to it, have nagged me and flamed me over the years for having the "greedy" idea of trying to make a living writing software.  As soon as there is open food, open home,  and open car, I'll give open source a more serious look.

Gary Trudeau, who does Doonesbury, is the same case. He probably started out mildly left and has slowly moved further and further to the left.  I'm not sure who actually reads Doonesbury at this point, they're just so out of touch with reality that one has to wonder how it manages to still get syndicated.

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Insults Unpunished has an entry about whether the Kyoto accords are dead. The Kyoto accords serve as an excellent litmus test for European anti-Bush bias. If you blame Bush for the Kyoto accords not being accepted in the United States, congratulations, you're an anti-Bush bigot.

The senate issued a resolution back in 1997 (passed unanimously) saying that it would not allow the Kyoto accords to pass. It has been dead in the United States since early in the Clinton era. But it's easy to blame Bush just like they blame Bush for the failure for the International Criminal Court to get passed here.  Both issues 0% chance to become law here. Besides the violations to the constitution, particularly in the case of the ICC, the Kyoto accords were arbitrary and unfair. China gets off the hook? What a joke. If you can make nukes, you're not a developing country.

The United States is actually quite efficient with energy per GDP.  One thing anyone from say Europe or Asia will quickly discover when they visit the United States is the lack of pollution. Having been to Europe, the difference is pretty significant (Western Europe anyway).  Clean air. Clean water. Lots of woods.  There are exceptions but the United States does take pollution seriously relatively speaking.  Meanwhile, over in China, most major cities rely on wood burning stoves for their heat and (ahem) "power". Talk to them.

 

I uploaded two new suites today. Just putting the finishing touches on Object Desktop 2004. The guys at the office have been working incredibly hard. Poor Kris has been burning the midnight oil trying to resolve a bunch of different things.

For example, WindowBlinds 4.2 just doesn't work well yet on Windows 98/ME. The main problem is that those two OSes are total shit. We should have just said "No WB 4 on Win98/ME". But we promised to support it and we're suffering because of it. So this weekend Kris will be spending time with Neil trying to decrease the GDI objects WindowBlinds uses (Win98Draginol only allow 128K, yes, KILOBYTES, of memory to be used for ALL GDI objects).

I will say right now, WindowBlinds 5 will not support Win98/ME.  WindowBlinds 4.x will be the end of the line for those DOS based OSes. If we have a version marked as version 5 for Win98Draginol it'll be WB 4.x still rebranded to keep things simple. If we'd been smart, we would have taken WB 3.5 for Win98 and just renamed it WB 4. There's really not much else one can skin on Win98Draginol at this point.

I'll be happy once we have WindowBlinds 4.2 out the door and get Object Desktop 2004 completed.

Paul got his Christmas Time Suite done. The frustrating thing is that WinCustomize is pokey due to the decrease in available hardware from the recent server crashes. This has affected JoeUser a bit too but not nearly to the level WC has been affected. So we've started a subscription drive to try to buy some new hardware. The goal is to get 500 people to buy premium WC subscriptions. It's a really good deal for all the stuff you get. But even if you didn't get that stuff, it's amazing how most people won't spend a dime helping contribute to something they take a lot from.

WinCustomize gets over 2 MILLION visitors per month. 500 new subscribers out of 2 million is such a tiny percentage and yet there is doubt we'll reach that goal. Which would be a shame because it would mean an end to WinCustomize as we know it today. For starters, non-subscribers would be put on a very tiny pipe.  Normally you can download skins and wallpapers and icons at 200K per sec if you have a cable modem.  That would all change though because WinCustomize IS going to get those new servers no matter what. The question is whether the users will pay for it in subscriptions or whether Stardock will foot the bill. If Stardock ends up having to pay for the servers, it's going to come out of the bandwidth budget.

I think it'll make it but I guess deep down somewhere, I really imagined that when the site says "Hey, we're hurting here, we lost 2 servers, we could really use your help" I pictured thousands of people stepping up to the plate.  In 2 days we've gotten about 50 people.  To put it in perspective, 70,000 unique visitors came to the site today. 24 of them today bought subscriptions. Which is much higher than normal. But many of those users are good people who actually subscribed twice.  So you have incredibly generous people helping out the site way beyond the call of duty and then the majority who could care less.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in the middle. We have people internally at Stardock who would love to see WinCustomize be purely a Stardock portal and eliminate any sections that are seen as being drains or competitive in nature.  But WinCustomize is also the place where most people get their Sysmetrix skins, Litestep themes, ICQ Plus skins, NeXTStart themes, and a whole host of other programs that few people would know about otherwise. I'd hate to see it become a purely Stardock site. But supporting the other sections is basically a form of corporate charity. And if we can't even manage to get 500 people to help the site out in its time of need then that'll really show that there's very little good will.

 In addition to helping keep WinCustomize going, your subscription gains you the following benefits:

• Unlimited bandwidth use. This equals unlimited downloads of skins, themes, icons, and wallpapers.
• The WinCustomize System Tray Applet that will update you when new skins, themes, etc. show up.
• Two Premium WinCustomize skin suites.
• Coming in 2004: A personal gallery blog page.
• Coming in 2004: Prioritized bandwidth access for subscribers (faster performance).
• Coming in 2004: Skin Groups (Groups of users can basically form their own magazines recomming skins, themes, etc.).
• The WinCustomize Skin Browser (see screenshots of v2 below).

  

  

 

The WinCustomize Skin Browser bypasses all that HTML and hooks directly into the WinCustomize database allowing incredibly fast use of the site.

A WinCustomize subscription lasts for TWO years and is only $20. That's less than a dollar per month.

If you read my article responding to Dvorak's column on blogging, you can tell I'm a bit annoyed with it. Having had a day to think about it and lots of email on the topic, I've narrowed down specifically why his column bugs me so much:

1. It's based on a number of false premises. Specifically, he lumps all blogs together as if every person on the net is aiming to be a quasi-journalist. It's sloppy research which really bugs me when it's in the pages of PC Magazine.
2. I like Dvorak. I know he's off sometimes but I really respect him a great deal. So seeing him, well, blow it on something I'm familiar with makes me question some of the things he says when I'm not as familiar with the topic which is a bit of a let down.
3. Condescension. I don't like someone treating me like I'm a sucker. To imply that bloggers are a bunch of chumps for not realizing how few people read most blogs is insulting. Of course we know. Personal web pages have existed for a decade. I've had a home page for nearly that long. The difference is purely that now there are tools that make it much easier to update the pages with daily news and such.
4. It's revealing. That is, such a hard sell on readers that blogs are a passing fad makes me wonder if there's more to it.

Let's get to the brass tacks. What he's referring to is indie journalism. Most indie journalism comes in blog form.  While Glenn Reynolds didn't think that Dvorak was talking about him, to me it's pretty obvious - top blogger now writing MSNBC articles, who else fits that profile? http://www.glennreynolds.com takes you to MSNBC.  People like Reynolds, Sullivan, Lileks and others may be "professional" writers but what they write about is definitely different than what most people hear about.

For example, anyone who checks out Right Wing News, or Little Green Footballs, or Steven Den Beste's pages can find out things that they haven't heard about from "big media".  It is up to each individual to do analysis on the source and determine what they think is true and what is suspect.  While Bill O'Reilly may argue that you can't trust any of this "Internet stuff" and Dvorak thinks everything worthwhile is already "co-opted", the fact is, the traditional forms of media are just as suspect in many cases. I've been in the press enough times and up close enough to know how sloppy it is often done. And I've seen press releases from lobby groups taken as fact and regurgitated. Remember the "millions" of homeless stories we used to hear about? That number was made up. Maybe there are millions homeless people (I doubt it) but when the number was being thrown around, it hadn't been researched one iota.  Or the infamous examples of stories that talk about how much domestic violence there is that turned out to have been fabricated. In other words, the quality of news on Instapundit or other "top blogs" is right up there with what you can expect from NBC or CBS or ABC and certainly CNN (which was recently outed for bending the news in favor of Saddam for the past decade in exchange for getting to stay in Iraq. Oh yea, big media is to be trusted...).

The numbers though really speak for themselves. I've seen them first hand. Since we opened up JoeUser.com for other people to have blogs, we've gotten thousands of new bloggers just here.  The Alexa ranking of this site is now in the top 17,000 sites. People clearly are interested in hearing the views of other people.

I tell ya, I really wish I could go back exactly 2 weeks.

Here's what I would do:

a) Get all the WinCustomize.com skin libraries backed up.
Get redundancy going on the sites
c) Get THREE brand new machines to the server site.

Right now, JoeUser.com, WinCustomize.com, Stardock.com, and all our other sites are running on TWO machines. Two PCs. It's ridiculous. But we've had two machines die in the past month. Not a shining time for Dell (nor their fault).

One failed machine has a motherborad problem which causes it to constantly reboot. The other had a hard drive crash.

And so we've had to consolidate everything to 2 machiens while we rush to ship new machines there while we work out the warranty procedures on what's broken. But that is the #1 reason why things are a little sluggish. We're sending out one tomorrow and hopefully it'll be taking part of the load off next week.

It's really frustrating because the sites, particularly WinCustomize.com, had been builting to incredible levels of traffic. WinCustomize was getting up to 80,000 unique visitors per day. Since the crash, it hasn't gotten back to 70,000 per day yet. That's at 15% decrease in users. JoeUser hasn't been quite as heavily hit because it's much newer. But I can feel things just being slower and there's just nothing that can be done before hardware gets there. The database server is now on a machine that was designed to be a file server. It's a hard thing to go from being on a dual 3Ghz Xeon setup with SCSI to some 1.2 Ghz machine with a few IDE drives on it.

Paul Boyer, better known as Mormegil, has released his "Christmas Time" WindowBlinds visual style! If you have WindowBlinds, you can change your entire desktop right now to have a holiday look and feel. You can download the visual style here.

John Dvorak's new column in the current issue of PC Magazine argues that blogging is going to "bite the dust" owing primarily to 2 factors: Popular bloggers being co-opted by big media with everyone else being too obscure to keep the trend going.

This article at JoeUser.com argues that just the opposite is happening. What do you think?