I'm having a lot of fun with making DesktopX objects. Tonight I made a couple of neat ones. I made an animated wallpaper that has snow falling on it. If you already have DesktopX installed you can get that here. It was amazingly easy to create. I just made one snow flake, added 3 lines of VB script and then cloned it a gazillion times with the mouse and voila, falling snow.

My other fun for the night was this soccer game here. You can download that by going to this link. What I did is I combined some DesktopX PNG objects with a DesktopX flash object. It was fairy easy to do.  I'm not going to do this enmasse until I find a better way to promote the people who make these flash games. Right now I just link to them but I want to do more.

This sort of thing though has really re-sparked my interest in creating neat little things. Try it out and see for yourself.

Ever wanted to have snow flakes falling on your desktop? Tonight we put together an animated wallpaper. Snowflakes, fully alpha blended to your desktop falling at different speeds with different sizes. And best of all - it uses almost no CPU.

If you don't have DesktopX yet, GET IT NOW: http://www.desktopx.net

If you want to try out the animated snowflakes, go here: https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=31&SkinID=2816

What is it with car manufacturers and REAR-wheel drive? What is particularly ironic about this is that the "Big 3" are located in Detroit Michigan. Which is roughly where I live. They must drive special, magical roads that I don't have access to. Maybe they're Stone-Cutters or something because the roads I drive on have snow on them quite a bit during the year which makes a rear-wheel drive car impractical.

And yet...the cool cars I'm interested in are rear-wheel drive.  For example:

Here is the Cadillac XLR. It has a Corvette engine in it. Looks really cool. It's a two seater but....it's rear wheel drive.

I have a few fairly unusual requirements:

1. Must have Head's Up Display. I am used to it now. My Grand Prix had it, my Bonneville has it. It would be hard to go back to a car that doesn't have it.
2. I really care about how it looks on the outside. I don't really care that much about how fast it is, as long as it's responsive.
3. I want the interior to have an integrated compass. GPS would be nice, and smart cruise control.
4. It would also be nice if it had some sort of map read out that hooks into that GPS.
5. Must be all wheel drive or at least front wheel.

This car above has everything but #5.  I won't be buying (or leasing in my case) for another year so there's time to look around. But it's a bummer to see how many cool cars coming out that are rear wheel drive.

My friend recommended the Volvo S80 to me. The problem I have with that car is the outside styling. It also fails the head's up display and smart cruise control. It does seem to have an option for GPS and a screen for displaying the map and it has an all-wheel drive option but it fails too many of the other options.

 

I have other biases as well. I prefer to buy American cars. In fact, I've never bought anything but American cars.  The last rear wheel drive car I had was 10 years ago -- my Chevette. My options were more limited then. I am hoping to be able to get a cool car before I reach the age where people look at me like I'm having a mid-life crisis...

 

There are basically two types of bloggers. And JoeUser.com is aimed at supporting both of them.

Web Diarists

The first type of blogger is the web diarist. This is a person who wants to be able to share his or her thoughts about their lives in a way that is recorded for the long haul. My wife fits more into this category. Years from now, she wants to be able to look back and be able to show that she did indeed think about things and do things besides change diapers and chase after our little sons.  Diarists are motivated by the desire to record their lives for posterity.

Web Editorialists

The second type of blogger is the indie editorialist. That's what I consider myself. Most of the top bloggers fall into this category because their blogs are designed specifically to be read by others. And in fact, they are designed to be read by as many people as possible. I became a editorialist out of frustration with the media. For one thing, I've done enough media tours over the years to know that many people who write the articles we read on a day to day basis know little about what they are talking. Whether that be politics, technology, software, games, etc. they often have their voice simply because those more knowledgeable than them simply went on to more lucrative pursuits.

To be fair, I don't want to imply that all journalists fall into this category. Most of the top journalists that you read on-line, in magazines, etc. really do know what they're doing. But enough journalists are clueless about the issues they write about (and I've witnessed this first hand) that I wanted to set up a forum that made it easy for people, all people, to have a shot at being able to editorialize.  Which brings me to the second motivation of web editorialists. What gets covered by the mainstream media is often not based on any sense of fairness but rather luck or the journalists personal tastes. 

And so that is where blogging, as an indie editorial movement, has really taken off.  Now anyone can have a voice.  Sure, you end up with a lot of crap. But how is that different than some of the dribble written by professionals?  How is Tucker Carlson's new book written any better than what Steven Den Beste writes? Can someone explain how Michael Moore's views are more well founded than what is written by Sanity from the Left?

Being a good web editorialist

So what about those web editorialists? Those bloggers who write things that they want others to read? Part of my reason to open up JoeUser.com to others was frustration out of my personal blog not getting linked to. I'm sure many of you reading this who have had blogs know that frustration. As an engineer, I want to see the popular blogs be largely based on quality. Not based largely on how long they've been around. Or worse, based on the decision of one person on a popular blog site who chooses, often on a whim, to link to another blog.

That's where JoeUser.com really comes in. If you have Alexa, you may have noticed that with only 2 months of availability to the public to have blogs, JoeUser has climbed to being in the top 20,000 most popular websites in the world. I predict within another month it'll be in the top 15,000 and still be climbing. This is important for bloggers because of the way JoeUser is set up -- the main page of JoeUser is designed for YOU. All blogs written are available from the home page. Popular blogs are highlighted. Top users are highlighted. Top articles are highlighted. Users have the ability to give points to articles they think are particularly well written thus pushing them up. And you can see who is linking to your articles giving users an incentive to go out and get their blogs linked and automatically rewarding those who link to them with a back link.

What gets featured on the home page is still currently handled by me. Eventually, as the site matures and gets more users, articles that get a lot of "Interesting" and "Insightful" ratings will be highlighted to me so that I can feature them quickly (right now I have to read through them). 

The idea isn't to feature articles that provide a certain point of view but rather articles that meet these fairly straight foward critiera:

Which articles tend to get highlighted:

• Good subject matter that interests other people and is coherent.
• Well written articles. Specifically, relatively low on spelling and grammar errors. Have a topic and make a coherent point. Sometimes poorly written articles (I featured one tonight that I wish I hadn't) do make it up if they were provocative but generally quality of the article matters.
• Is visually appealing. That means good formatting. Spaces between paragraphs help. Bullet points. You're not writing a thesis.
• Articles that aren't excessively wordy. Length isn't your friend. If you can make the same point with fewer words, that is good. This is a problem I run into. I tend to use more words than I need because I type 120 words per minute.
• No profanity.
• Has links in the article to sources or other things when possible.

I tend to write my articles in Front Page, then copy the HTML into the clipboard and paste them into JoeUser. It makes it much easier to write articles.

But whether you're writing because you want to add your voice to the world in the form of an indie editorial or you're just sharing your day to day life with those who are interested, I hope you're finding JoeUser an interesting and enjoyable place. We have a lot of other goodies in the works that we think will increase that enjoyment further.

I'm hoping to get JoeUser t-shirts made and send them out to the top users and top bloggers. If you're a regular here without an account, create one as every time you write a comment you get points and if others think what you write is interesting, they can give you more points too!

Happy blogging!

 

If you have DesktopX you can now make use of this cool JoeUser reader object. Just sits on your desktop, updates every 10 minutes with the latest main pages blog entries.

Get it here.

Is it me or is the Internet overall very slow today?

I'm going to write something more in depth once I get a better feel for Panther (10.3).

I like my Mac. It's a fine machine. But Macs, since going to OS X (including 10.3) feel much more sluggish.

I also find them very limited in how much you can change them in how they work. If Apple hasn't thought of it, you're not likely to be able to find a tool, freeware or otherwise, that will let you change its behavior.

I also find the lack of freeware for it to be a major downside. I buy hundreds of dollars in software a year personally but I don't like getting nickled and dimed for every little thing. Sure, freeware exists for the Mac but in much lower quantities, even factoring in the sizes in the markets.

The Mac is excellent at doing specific things with. If your job is doing the kinds of things that the Mac environment excels at (graphics, some types of office work) then I would give the Mac an edge in those areas.

But the further you stray from that, its environment can seem limiting (to me anyway).

It also has to fight against the fact that, like it or not, it has a small market share which means most people are USED to the way Windows (and DOS) work. I spent a lot of time in college working with Unix flavors but I don't have any partiuclar desire to go back to that sort of thing now.

Which is to me, a major downside on the Mac. The basics are done very slickly. If you want to do more powerful stuff, you quickly find yourself imeshed in Unix stuff which I just don't want to deal with. Sharing of printers over a mixed network, accessing network resources of various sorts, etc. can all be quite a pain in the butt, even in 10.3 which is actually worse in some respects in that area.

But if go Mac all the way, it can be a very compelling environment and OS to deal with.

But I don't think it's compelling enough to get a significant percentage of Windows users to switch.

After all, OS/2 had a massive advantag over Windows 10 years ago and we all know how that turned out.

Today I found another really cool use for IconDeveloper. I am in the process of writing up documentation for Object Desktop. As any technical writer will tell you, the useage of icons in a technical document to highlight key points is critical to creating clearly understood directions.

But how to do that? Microsoft Word wouldn't let me. IE won't load them correctly for some reason. The built in Windows XP viewer didn't work.  But...But... IconDeveloper would open them.

So I just double clicked on it and got what you see in that screenshot (click to zoom in). Then I double clicked on one and I have Corel Photopaint set up as my editor. It loaded up Corel Photopaint with the icon already selected. Just copied, and then pasted. Voila. Very useful and time saving.

 

MadIce writes:
I agree with your "True progress, in my opinion, is a melding of ethics and a realistic understanding of human nature." But isn't that a liberal point of view? It would allow you to make a progressive decision.

Not necessarily. Each side's ideologues believe they have a lock on both.

Communism failed because it didn't take into account human nature (which led to cascading inefficiency that ultimately spelled its ruin -- people generally want to succeed for themselves and their families, not for the state). Fascism failed because it had no ethics (which led to everyone focusing on its destruction in a violent way). American conservatism and liberalism falls far in between those two extremes.

I do not believe that the government rules us. I see the government leading us but we control the government. It's a service provider that we set up. It exists at our convenience.  In other words, the government exists to serve us. But liberals tend to see the government as the solution to many of life's problems. And to do that, they see the need to invest more and more power into the government. A binding power that, given time, turns what we consider basic rights into privileges.  Conservatives tend to see government as a necessary evil. An instrument to implement things that we cannot, as individuals, take care of that must be taken care of (roads, defense being the main two things).

Conservatives tend to see the government as merely this thing we set up to take care of a few things. So when people start suggesting that it should have power over us (such as telling us what we can and can't own in our homes) conservatives have a problem. Note that I use the term conservatives and not Republicans. Republicans are not purely conservative anymore than Democrats are purely liberal.

Americans, particularly conservatives, tend to feel that we are allowed to do anything we want unless expressly forbidden by a law. And even then, we can change those laws. Increasingly, liberals tend to take the opposite track, that the government should decide what behaviors, attitudes, even thoughts are allowed.  To any Europeans reading this, this must seem absurd, backwards. That's because it is. Somewhere down the line, things got switched around. In the United States, it's increasingly liberals looking to take away things from Americans and conservatives wanting to provide more freedoms (or arguably restore more freedoms hence "conservatives").

Moreover, Conservatives want to see the laws made and enforced as locally as possible. Liberals prefer to see laws made and enforced on a national level. I see nothing progressive in that. In fact, I don't really see anything "progressive" about American liberalism. In some ways, such as political correctness laws and policies (seen particularly on campuses), American liberalism is regressive.

So what is progressive really depends on your point of view. My own point of view is that philosophies that promote greater freedom for individuals, as a whole, are progressive.  And I find, overall, that conservative values are more along those lines.

 

Skinning your icons? Yep. Adam, lead developer of IconDeveloper, has written an article previewing a new feature in IconDeveloper that will let users SKIN their icons. That is, mix images together to create new icons. It's pretty impressive.