It has to be said. She's been working on these incredible skins that are only available internally at Stardock right now as we decide what to do with them for the WindowBlinds 3 launch. But these skins are just plain incredible. She's the one who is making skins like XP Charcoal, XP Platinum, XP Copper, XP Cobalt, XP Emerald, Lemon. Now one might think that it's just a matter of taking one of the existing XP skins and changing the hue or something. It's not. She's really done some amazing stuff here.

She's really talented, even for a Canadian which says a lot since all the people we work with in graphics heavily are from Canada. Clearly something in the water in Canada.

I just had to get that off my chest, she's a artistic genius. But she's too humble to acknowledge it!

This is pretty funny. It's a .pps file (power point slide show I believe) but if you run it, it's really cool.

https://www.stardock.com/temp/boeing.pps

https://www.stardock.com/stardock/articles/skinprimer/skinprimer2002.html

A couple of years ago I wrote a skin primer to help pitch Wired magazine to do an article on the skin community. It was kind of shabby and quickly done up. It's pretty out of date now.

This evening (after Survivor and the President's press conference) I went and rewrote it from scratch. Obviously I'm not the ideal person to write a skin primer since I work for Stardock. But hopefully the information contained will be viewed as objective and useful to novices.

We're going to have a lot of new users coming as XP rolls out and it would be good to have something they can refer to.

This is just the rough draft that I whipped up in the last hour and a half or so. I haven't put in screenshots yet since that'll take more time. Will work on that tomorrow evening (since I'm doing this in my spare time).

Anyway, let me know what you think. Any suggested changes and such.

Check out this hilarious article at The Onion:

http://www.theonion.com/onion3734/hijackers_surprised.html

Excerpt:
JAHANNEM, OUTER DARKNESS—The hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon expressed confusion and surprise Monday to find themselves in the lowest plane of Na'ar, Islam's Hell.
"I was promised I would spend eternity in Paradise, being fed honeyed cakes by 67 virgins in a tree-lined garden, if only I would fly the airplane into one of the Twin Towers," said Mohammed Atta, one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, between attempts to vomit up the wasps, hornets, and live coals infesting his stomach. "But instead, I am fed the boiling feces of traitors by malicious, laughing Ifrit. Is this to be my reward for destroying the enemies of my faith?"

You know, on this website we've debated everything..

Well...not everything. We've debated politics. We've debated ethics. We've debated capitalism (many times).

But we haven't ever discussed religion. Can you believe that?

My son asked me this weekend what happens to people when they die. I copped out on it and said that I didn't know because I haven't died before.

But it got my wife and I thinking. What happens after we die?

If you had 10 points to distribute between beauty and intelligence (not wisdom), how would you distribute it?

I'm probably more along the lines of 7 intelligence, 3 beauty. Well, to be perfectly honest, I think that I got ripped off and only got 8 points and well, let's just say 7 got put onto intelligence..

But I think I would split mine 6 to 4. Each year I find that intelligence isn't all it's cracked up to be. Wisdom doesn't necessarily take high intelligence, just efficient use of experience.

I dunno. What do you guys think?

I want to publicly thank the people who keep WinCustomize going on a daily basis. They are humble and don't often make their presence known to others.

Make no mistake, without their help, this site couldn't go on. Please give a big hand to..

JAFO who viligently and thanklessly goes through and helps keep the wallpaper section sane.

DavidK who also helps moderate the sections and helps users out when in need.

Treetog, who has helped many people and also moderates the stuff uploaded.

Migeleto, who also helps out on moderation.

And of course..

Alexandrie, who not only moderates but helps add features and web site themes to it and is the overall queen of WinCustomize.

Without these volutneers, giving precious hours of their spare time, there'd be no WinCustomize.

Stardock is putting all its energies into getting WindowBlinds 3 ready. WindowBlinds 3 represents the most significant rewrite to WindowBlinds since the earliest betas (0.39 for those old timers).

Its new design is based on WindowBlinds XP, a Windows XP specific version of the program (the final version will all be called WindowBlinds 3 and work on all Windows platforms to reduce confusion).

The full enhanced version is currently only available as part of Stardock's Object Desktop. Users who want to get that can order it at https://www.stardock.com/order.html

Anyone here ever play Counterstrike?

We actually have a server - cs.stardock.net with punkbuster installed (www.punkbuster.com).

Who here plays that game? (I do!)

A stinging but appropriate parody is available at National Review. It points out how different the world might be today had our leaders in 1941 behaved like our leaders today seem to behave.