The end of the year is always a time of reflection for me, of looking back over the past and thinking about the reasons to be grateful. One of the big things for me, and for my family, this past year was getting to meet Cory Doctorow in person.

I have been a fan of his for a number of years, ever since someone recommended that I read his novel "Little Brother." I really wish I could remember who that was. After the first book, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, Makers and For The Win soon followed. But there was more.

While I still worked at Stardock, Zubaz and I found that we shared the pleasure of reading Cory's stories. One night, I wrote Cory a note of thanks...and he responded! Almost immediately. I can't tell you how cool I found that!

I couldn't wait to tell my kids. One thing led to another and soon we all began to share and enjoy his works. (One day, if I am really lucky, my son will give me back my copy of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town - at least that is my hope.)

Over the months and years, Cory and I have exchanged emails and I have included my kids in the correspondence. My reasons have been twofold- Cory is exactly the kind of person, with the kind of vision, that I think is important to share with your children; and it makes me seem marginally cooler, you know for a parental type figure, that I know him. Sort of. Which brings me to the next point.

This past September, I received a note that Cory would be speaking in Ann Arbor, as part of the Penny Stamps Lecture Series panel on Futurology. I emailed my daughter and we made plans to go. We both enjoyed the first part of the presentation, which was held in the Michigan Theater, a large space that filled up pretty much completely. But after that, there was a smaller session. We got to sit front row. I was wearing my best "Talk Nerdy to Me" t-shirt, a shirt I bought after reading Cory's short story, "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth."

Cory was signing books afterwards. When we came up with our copies of Little Brother (my daughter Lauren) and Makers (that was for me) I introduced myself and Lauren and Cory greeted us both warmly. He spoke with us and was a true gentleman.

As we were leaving, my daughter said to me "That was the coolest thing in my life." I have to tell you, I walked the rest of the way slightly above the ground.

It is truly wonderful that there are still people so warm and so truly courteous in the world.

 

Happy birthday, Neil. And thank you. Thank for all the cool software (WindowBlinds, WindowFX, Multiplicity, DirectSkin and so much more); thank you for your role in the Community; and thank you for all the years of friendship.

Here is wishing you many happy returns. 

 

I recently bought a new and faster Micro SD card for my Epic 4G. I tried to copy the files on my old Micro SD card over through my Windows computer; however Windows Explorer failed. I have a number of applications installed on my SD and Windows was just not happy with .gz format files, etc. 

A number of back up and cloning utilities were suggested at various forums; the one that I found be the best, in terms of small footprint and ease of use, is the HDD Raw Copy tool from HDD Guru. It is free, so small and light that you can run it as a portable app, easy to use and did I mention free? 

There are may other utilities that have fancier interfaces or more functions, but this did the job for me and fits easily on a USB stick.

It is going to be part of my tool kit from here on out. I hope this helps someone.

If you are like me and people ask you to fix their computers, you probably carry a set of applications on a USB drive, your PC toolkit. SARDU, developed by Davide Costa, is a meta-tool, an application that lets you create and customize a bootable USB or CD/DVD toolkit. Get it? It is a tool for making a really cool toolkit.

You download and unzip SARDU to your computer. Using a very simple interface, you can add components, as you wish, to create a really powerful and customized bootable USB drive or disc. You can have, for example, more than a dozen anti-virus Rescue discs residing on the same USB, for example. The AVG Rescue disc didn't clean everything? Well, just run the Bit-Defender Rescue disc.

Can't get everything sorted that way? Well try going in running one of the Live Linux distros available. Not a Linx fan? There are Windows utilities available as well.

SARDU doesn't force you to use one over the other. The application lets you pick and choose (although it does manage downloads for some or point you to the websites for others) to create what you want.

SARDU is free for download, although it is certainly worthy of support via donation.

When I was more active in the JoeUser, Stardock and Wincustomize Communities, posting on my birthday was an annual (Duh!) ritual. It has been a while, so pardon me if I am rusty.

I woke this morning in the manner that passes for normal in my house. I checked the news as I always do. I began with the obituary section. My name wasn't there so I knew that I had to get up. I did receive a wonderful, wonderful present from President Obama and it would be remiss of me if I did not thank him. I am 56 today and this is the first time that I am celebrating without Osama Bin-Laden or Anwar al-Awlaki  in the world. Our President knew just what I wanted. Thank you, sir, you rock. And best of luck in 2012.

This is the first year since 2001, when the World Trade Towers still stood tall in my home town on New York, that I am not going to work (physically or remotely) at Stardock. Instead, I just returned from my first visit to my new employer, GameStop HQ in Dallas. It was just an awesome trip.

I got to meet, only briefly of course, with Tony Bartel, GameStop President. More correctly, I was at a round-table meeting which he also attended. OMG is he a smart and savvy guy. I did get to meet GameStop CEO Paul Raines in person, shook hands and chatted. Another really, really smart guy. In fact, everyone that I met at GameStop was smart and sharp. But the coolest part, for me, was that I got to hang out with all the old crew from the original Stardock Impulse team, or as I like to say "my brothers and sisters."

Really great to hang out with Zargon, Dean and the GreenReaper. Our marketing team needed a fix for how the Impulse Deal of the Day displayed. We walked over to the IT area, explained what we needed to GreenReaper and he explained that it had already been rolled out in that morning's update. Now that, my friends, is what you call being proactive.

As always, I worked most closely with Zoomba and Dash. Those guys continue to rock out, along with their team. The boys, along with their lovely wives, took me out for a pre-birthday bash. Once again, Zoomba brings in a project ahead of schedule. Thank you.

it was a wonderful week, a truly great mix of the old and the new. Tonight my kids, Jon and Lauren, are taking me out for pizza. The heck with that low-salt, low-fat diet. Pizza is the Food of the Gawds.

It has been a truly great year, a year of transition and positive change. I am looking forward to the next year. As I tell everyone in the gaming business, we are the luckiest people in the world. What we do for a living is what most people get fired for doing at work.

Although I am not as active a member as I used to be, I want to thank everyone at Stardock, JoeUser and WinCustomize for all their love and support. Once a Stardockian, always a Stardockian. Thanks for the best decade of my life...so far. Afterall, the future is so bright, I have to wear shades.

Thanks for reading!

Today is my last official day as a full-time Stardock employee; although there will be a transition period of some length where I'll still be around (what I like to refer to as the "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in" time) but as of Monday I will primarily be a GameStop employee.

I joined Stardock more than a decade ago, in February 2001. During my tenure, I was a part of the release of WindowBlinds for XP (that became WindowBlinds 3) at the Microsoft offices outside Detroit; the creation of the WinCustomize skinning community web site; the integration of skinning technology into applications by major corporations such as GE, ATI, Motorola, T-Mobile and many others; skinning being used to make computers look "futuristic" in movies, including "The Recruit"; and ultimately I was gratified to see the embrace of skinning as a mainstream movement by computer manufacturers like Dell and HP and organizations like the NHL and NBA. Good times indeed.

I have been proud to be a member not only of a company that was committed to "making cool stuff" but to a community that numbered millions of members. I have many friends at WinCustomize and JoeUser and I will, of course, stay in touch. But over the years my posts have become less frequent and my participation greatly diminished. It is not that I love you all any less, it is simply that my focus has shifted.

I was always part of Stardock's PC gaming initiatives, going as far back as The Corporate Machine. As time went on and Stardock published Galactic Civilizations I and II, Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod and Elemental, I spent more and more time involved in the gaming side of things. Never really on the games themselves (thank goodness! I suxx0rs as a gamer!) but on the business of game publishing, through Drengin.Net to TotalGaming.Net to Impulse. This will now become my principal focus.

As a part of this community, we shared many good times and some bad ones. I remember turning to the WinCustomize boards for relief after the 9/11 attack. Chatting with community members from around the world, we shared the pain and gave each other what comfort we could.

There are too many to thank by name and I fear that I would inadvertently omit someone near and dear. But let me thank my fellow Stardockians past and present ("we few, we happy few, we band of brothers"), all the developers and coders (the smart guys), the skinners, the bloggers and the whole IRC crowd. Thank you all for making my life richer.

Now, having gotten quite maudlin, what are you hanging around here reading this drivel for? Go skin something!

Cya! 

It has been a while since I have written one of these articles combining two of my favorite topics: Software and Free Things. In the past, they have turned collaborative, with members of the community adding their favorite programs and often teaching me. I hope that this time is no different.

I recently played with a couple of Linux distros, starting off with Live CDs (and Live USB installs) and then decided to install Ubuntu on a partition. Ran it quite happily for a while alongside Windows and then during an upgrade, Linux did a "bad thing" to my MBR. Now I don't want to get into a discussion about Super Grub disks (which I tried) on how real men edit Grub manually...I just want to set the stage. I decided that it was time for a clean re-install of Windows. I used to dread re-installations, always dreading that I was going to forget something, but this time I had a clean and painless re-installation using free software products, except for my OS.

I started with Partition Wizard, which I find the most user-friendly and easiest to use partition management software. The Home Edition is freeware (http://www.partitionwizard.com/) and I downloaded and burnt the bootable CD. That let me arrange my drive as I wanted and I could have used that to recover any files that I needed, but in this case, I didn't need anything. More about that later.

Having the drive as I wanted, I could now proceed to a clean install. My preference. I inserted my Windows 7 disk and let it do it's thing. Windows 7 seems to install much faster than any previous version of Windows even thought this wasn't on the fastest PC.

OS installed, I was now ready to add on my programs. I opened a link to Ninite Easy PC Setup, http://ninite.com/ (Thanks to Stardock's own "Shirley" for pointing that site out to me.) I went down the list creating an Uber installer that would basically get me back to where I wanted to be. Moving down the list, I installed:

Chrome

Pidgin

iTunes and Hulu

Irfanview

OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat and CutePDF

Microsoft Security Essentials

Flash, Java, .Net and Silverlight

Dropbox

CCleaner, Auslogics Defrag, CDBurnerXP

7Zip

Now all of these programs are also available as individual downloads from their own websites or from Download.com or similar sites, but because I used Ninite, I could let them all install and go out to the pool, knowing that I was going to get the latest versions and NO TOOLBARS! The installs could not be easier and are unattended, leaving me free time to bask in the sun. Ninite offers you choices, so if you prefer Firefox to Chrome, you'll find it there. I am truly thankful for this site.

The only two programs that I needed to complete my install that are not on Ninite are LastPass (http://lastpass.com/) which I use to manage my passwords and, ironically, Impulse. They are not one Ninite and I wrote to the Ninite folks to ask why they aren't when competitor programs. Within one day of my inquiry, I received a very polite response from Sascha Kuzins, Co-Founder of Ninite, "We add titles to the site mainly based on the number of requests we get from users through our request form and by email." So, if you are like me and use LastPass for passwords and Impulse for games and Stardock products, let the folks at Ninite know and maybe they will add them in. Anyway, at this time, you will need to add these programs on manually.

I mentioned Dropbox, one of the many solutions that allows you to store your files in the Cloud. I have been saving all of my documents, spreadsheets, presentations and PDFs on Dropbox for a while. Again, there are several similar solutions, but I find Dropbox the easiest to use. You can set up Private and Public locations, it defaults to a virtual folder in your Documents folder...again, trivially easy to use. I installed Dropbox, logged in and voila! Everything was back as it should be.

I have only recently switched to OpenOffice for home use. It has gotten so good, for what I need, i just can't justify the expense of an MS Office license. I do find that Microsoft Security Essentials is the lightest and fastest AV and anti-malware solution. I am coming to love Chrome as the browser of choice although I still have Firefox on two of my other PCs. Auslogic is the fastest defrag solution that I have found and again, a very small footprint. I don't do much which images, so Irfanview, which I have used for years, is just fine.

I mentioned that I have three PCs at home. (And I live alone, it is NOT an addiction, I can stop anytime I want...) A great program for controlling multiple PCs not in the same room (for that I would use Multiplicity, of course) is Teamviewer. See http://www.teamviewer.com/index.aspx It is also a superb solution if you are trying to help someone remote. Again, free for personal use.

 That's it for now. What are you favorites and what might I have missed?

 

 

 

So, I turned 52 today. Thats like 350 in internet years....and sometimes I feel that old.

It occurred to me that I have been working serious jobs for 30 years. Really, I graduated from college in 1977. And I have been at Stardock for almost a quarter of that time, almost 7 years. The time does indeed fly.

This year I posted my most controversial and commented blog post, "Jews On the Internet." Over 100 comments. Many of them of the form "I hate you, I hate you to death" but comments nonetheless. All because I stated that Jewish culture lends itself to entrepreneurship and on the Internet that can translate into wealth. I thought about this when I saw Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visit Microsoft to discuss whether Facebook might really be worth $10 billion.

For my next controversial article, I will raise the question whether African Americans might be better at basketball due to culture....

I had in fact written the "Jews On the Internet" article while working with my daughter on her Bat Mitzvah paper. As part of our cultural requirement, Lauren, my son Jon and I performed some comedy shticks, it is nice to know that the tradition goes on. I taught Lauren's 3rd and 7th grade Sunday School classes. I was truly honored that many of her classmates called me up to speak at their ceremonies.

My son, Jon, will turn 21 this year. He completed a hitch-hiking, train-hopping, tour of the Western United States and we both survived. Old age is hereditary, our children do this to us. He has given me a new appreciation for punk music, bless him for that. He is back in college and I am well-satisfied.

Next month, I start teaching an adult-ed class, that should keep me out of trouble.

Anyway, I have survived another year. Peace out.

The question of how many Jews there are begs the definition of "What is a Jew?" and also "Who is a Jew?" Questions that have been asked many a time.....mostly by other Jews. Being a Secular Jew myself, I like the most liberal, inclusive definition that includes....well ME. The biggest number that you will see is about 18 million Jews. This works out to something like 1/4 of one per cent of the world's population. So you would expect that our impact on the Internet would be proportional to our numbers.

Not so, bubbala. (A term of endearment, darling. Can you feel me virtually pinching your cheek? In a nice way.) The impact of Jews far outweighs their numbers. Lets look at "Who's A Yid?"

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google. Larry Page's mom, Gloria Page, is Jewish. Sergey Brin was born in Moscow, Russia, to Jewish parents, Michael and Eugenia, who fled to America for religious freedom.



Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, while he was a student at Harvard University. It was originally going to be limited to Harvard students, but expanded quickly. Zuckerberg saw the potential in the site and sought capital. He turned to Peter Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal and, not-so-coincidentally, also Jewish. Facebook is often rumored to be up for sale. How much is Facebook worth? Let me refer that to Mr. Thiel: "Facebook's internal valuation is around $8 billion based on their projected revenues of $1 billion by 2015." Founder Mark Zuckerberg is 23, or as we like to say, 10 years past his Bar Mitzvah.

Robert Kevin Rose is, comparatively, an old man at age 30. He is best known for founding Digg.com. Robert lost his job during the burst of the Dot Com bubble, ended up working as a production assistant on the show The Screen Savers He began appearing on air and stepped in as host after Leo Laporte left TechTV. On November 1, 2004, he started a site that combined social bookmarking, blogging, RSS into arguably the premier tech news site. Today Digg is rated among the 100 most popular sites on the web.

Scott Blum has been referred to as the "Sam Walton of e-commerce." Leaving a successful career as a shoe salesman as a youth, he founded Microbanks, a company that sold add-on memory modules for Macintosh computers. Before his 21st birthday, he sold Microbanks to Sentron Technology in San Diego for $2.5 million in cash. He would then co-found Pinnacle Micro with his father. Leaving there under a cloud of dubious accounting practices (he paid no penalty and admitted no guilt) he would go on to found Buy.com. He left before went public, returned to take it back private and it is now his baby.

RealNetworks is not the most beloved company in the world, nor is Real Player a favorite product. But there is no question that CEO and Founder Rob Glaser has been influential. When he founded Real Networks in 1994, at age 31, he was already a millionaire from his days at Microsoft. He has had a major impact on the Internet.

Certainly also worth mentioning are Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, whose mother is Jewish; Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who was born on the Lower East Side of New York to a Jewish mother and raised by his great-aunt and great-uncle in Chicago; and Phillipe Kahn, founder of Borland.

What would the Internet be like with Google, PayPal, Facebook, Digg.com, Buy.com? It would be very, very different.

Let me start off by saying that Kuperman's Fire by John J. Clayton moved my more than any other book that I have read in a long time. Only 304 pages in length, it took me longer to read than I would have thought. There were parts that I read over several times to savor; other times I had to stop after only a few pages because a passage left me emotionally drained.

It is hard to put Kuperman's Fire into a category. Is it suspense? There are certainly suspenseful portions. Is it philosophy? We follow the thoughts of protagonist as he wrestles with moral dilemmas of his life. Is it religion? Certainly much of the book deals with how Jews find meaning in the modern, post-Holocaust world.

Anthony Burgess wrote a book entitled Tremor of Intent in 1966 and subtitled the book "An Eschatological Spy Novel." (Eschatology is that part of theology and philosophy dealing with the end of the world.) This is the only work that comes to mind that I can compare to Kuperman's Fire. Certainly it is intended as a tribute to John J. Clayton's writing skills to be compared to Anthony Burgess.

Michael Kuperman is a successful and wealthy man, about to become wealthier as the software company where he is a partner merges with a larger firm. But a problem arises with a large and powerful client, a problem that might threaten the merger. Is the client selling chemical weapons to terrorists and rogue states? Michael suddenly finds himself as a man who knows too much, with his life and the lives of his family at stake.

When the story opens, Michael is facing a possible divorce. He and his wife are separated by many things, not the least of which is Michael's embrace of his Jewish heritage. How the family pulls together in the face of life-threatening danger is part of the story, and John Clayton manages to weave it in without resorting to cliches. Michael is also distant from his father, who has changed his name to "Cooper" a generation ago. Again, the confrontations and reconciliations between father and son ring true. Did John Clayton, whose family name was once Cohon, draw from his own experience? Whatever the source, the people, the situations and the dialog are believable.

Michael Kuperman spends much time thinking about what it means to be a Jew today, to have come from a long line of people who have survived holocausts and pogroms, who have survived attempts at genocide in every generation. And as a Jew, Michael is commanded to repay his survival with good deeds, with Mitzvot. How he choses to fulfill that obligation is part of the story.

I highly recommend this book. The writing is often beautiful, evocative and sometimes disturbing. Kuperman's Fire has touched my soul.

John J. Clayton lives in Massachusetts, where he teaches literature and creative writing. He has published two novels and two collections of fiction.