I tell ya, if you haven't had kids yet, appreciate your good health.

I'd always been one of those unusually healthy people. Perfect school attendance, never sick. Got married, still never got sick.

We had our first kid and for 4 years, no illness at all. But this year, our son started pre-school and BAM. Nasty stomach flu went through every person in the family. Lasted a week per person (4 people in the household) and on me rather than being REALLY sick for a week I was just somewhat sick for 2 weeks. All last week I pretty much just hang around the house laying down staring at the ceiling with a couple of hours to spend on the net (wireless laptop is a great entertainment device).

I think we're going to stop at 2 kids!

Well, it looks like banner ads may have to go. They don't pay hardly anything and the ad places realy are trying to get us to use pop-up ads instead.

Simply put, that's not acceptable. I don't know about you guys but I hate pop-up ads.

I've been pretty public in my support of how deviantART has supported itself - subscriptions in which the users get a bunch of goodies. I'd like to see us eventually do something like that. Provide a slick skin browing program, for instance, (https://www.stardock.com/temp/sb.jpg) as a goodie along with custom skins and other things we come up with. That way, users aren't "donating" to the site but actually getting good stuff with the knowledge they're helping the site.

This week the winners of the GUI Olmpics will be contacted to make arrangements for shipping their cash/prizes to them.

John Hughes, aka Honz, is one of the premiere WindowBlinds and Hoverdesk skin authors in the community. Not that long ago, he re-launched his site pixelperfect.

Honz has been one of the long time contributors to the skin community and has created a ton of skins over the years as well as tutorials.

Check out his site!

A week from this Monday, DesktopX 1.1 will arrive. Stardock has been putting a massive effort behind this release. It's the first public version of DesktopX since like July.

For skin authors, themers, and developers, here are some useful links:

Getting Started: http://www.desktopx.net/docs/gettingstarted.html

The new user manual:
http://www.desktopx.net/docs

Developer's page:
http://www.desktopx.net/development.html

Anyone with an account can submit news. And if it comes ot us, we generally will put it up if it's related to this site or just plain interesting.

So please feel free to submit news. This site gets millions of visitors so if you want to spread the word on something, submit it.

Ever wonder where WinCustomize's traffic comes from?

Here's a graph of March's referral statistics:

https://www.stardock.com/temp/mar02.gif

Bookmarks are return visitors plus people who visit because of Stardock's programs.

Stardock and WindowBlids.net are direct links from those pages. Those referrals used to go to skinz.org before WinCustomize was launched so you can imagine the impact that probably had on skinz in those days.

LotsOfSkins.com won nearly half the events but in points the results are as follows:

deviantART: 66 points
LotsOfSkins: 48 points
VelocityART: 38 points
Customize.org 14 points
Deskmod: 11 points
TweakXP 5 points

The overall skin author winners were:

#1 Grayhaze with his 5 gold medals goes home with over $1000 in cash and prizes.

#2 Hippy who goes home with about $500 in cash plus prizes.

#3 Treetog who just missed second place by a couple of points and goes home with about $400 in cash/prizes.

Thanks to their support, the skin sites won over $2500 in cash to help pay bandwidth, upgrade hardware, etc.

deviantART led with $918 in cash.

VelocityART actually came in second in cash winnings with $725.

LotsOfSkins was third in cash with $706.

The other sits took home about $350.

Congratulations!

Tomorrow we'll announce the overall winners (site and author) of the GUI Olympics, give a preview of the summer GUI Olympics and announce the 5 WindowBlinds-specific awards (not officially part of the GUI Olympics).

In the meantime, we would like to thank you all for visiting. And we'd like to especially thank the dozens of GUI designers (skin authors) to created some of the best visual styles ever seen ever.

We'd also like to thank the participating sites as well as many other sites who helped make the GUI Olympics a big success. It's been a heck of a lot of fun!

Congratulations to everyone who entered.

The GUI Olympics finished its last event and the gold, silver and bronze medals for the best overall visual style created for the GUI Olympics were announced...

Well go over there and look!