It has been almost 3 years since I got my last cell phone, a Blackberry 8800. While it was nice, the UI was very sparse, and dare I say ugly. Ever since the Palm Pre was announced earlier this year, I have been itching to get one. Unfortunately, they are not available on my current provider. My wife, her parents, and I all share a family plan on the T-Mobile network which allows us to keep our cell phone charges way down so if I was going to get a new phone, it would have to be one that T-Mobile offered. When my wife's phone suddenly died 3 weeks ago, we started looking at new phones and finally settled on the new MyTouch phones from T-Mobile. My wife does not use 90% of the features on her phone because she finds it a bit challenging to figure out. To help solve this problem, we both decided to get the same phone, so that I would be able to help her out if she had any questions or issues.

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It seems that everyone is jumping on the OpenID bandwagon - kinda.  First came WordPress.  Then Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and now Google.  It seems that all the major internet players now officially support OpenID in one fashion or another.  In almost every case, the major players have really just stuck their toe in the water by becoming OpenID providers.  This means that your accounts on all of these services have now become valid OpenID tokens.  This is great news but it is not enough.

For most users, getting an OpenID account has never been a problem.  Anyone who wanted to use OpenID could easily have signed up with MyOpenID, MyID, ClaimID, Verisign or many other OpenID providers.  The real challenge for most users has been finding a site that accepts OpenID.  The list (also another one here) of sites that accepts OpenID is growing.  However, if you peruse those lists you will notice something missing.  Namely, what you won’t find is WordPress, or Yahoo, or AOL or Microsoft or Google on the list of sites accepting OpenID.

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Dare Obasanjo posted about Three Things I Learned About Software in College, which Scott Hanselman followed up with Three Things I Learned About Software WHILE NOT in College.  So here are my lists:

Things I learned about software in college

1. Never close your eyes to learning.  The world of software is constantly evolving and if you don't stay in a learning mode, you will fall behind.  I started college writing code on mainframes and left college coding on PCs.
2. There is no one perfect language.  There are the languages you know, the languages you don't know, and the languages that have yet to be created.  If you are following rule number 1, then the language you use today is likely not going to be the same as the one you use 5 years from now.  Get used to it.
3. Programming is primarily about problem solving.  Improve your logical thinking skills and you will improve your programming skills.

Things I learned about software WHILE NOT in college

1. No matter how good of a programmer you think you are, there is always someone better and faster:  Unless your name is Scott Hanselman.
2. You are not as good a programmer as you think you are.
3. Often, "good enough" is "perfect".

Things I THOUGHT I learned about software in college (but which I apparently need to keep re-learning)

1. Some of my most brilliant code was written in the wee hours of the morning, the night before it was due.
2. Some of my buggiest code was written in the wee hours of the morning, the night before it was due.
3. Good code rarely happens in a vacuum.

I recently installed the Pinnacle Studio version 11 upgrade and found this while while going through the ReadMe file:

7. Windows XP: Switching User During Capture.
Never do this. Very bad things will happen.

Sometimes though I think that being a little too succinct with warning messages can have just the opposite effect of the one intended.  When I saw that I immediately thought...  Maybe I should give it a try just to see what happens.  To me, this warning is about the equivalent of you mom telling you not to do something and when pressed for a reason says "Because I said so that's why!"  That answer just made me all the more determined to do whatever it was I had been told not to do.

Even now, as I sit here, my mind is wandering through all the possibilities of how bad could it truly be.  Maybe I could try this in a VM.. just in case?  Is it so bad that even a VM couldn't protect me?  Would it be one of those spectacular crashes resulting in a blue screen and an unbootable system...  or would it be one of those really subtle bugs that slowly saps the energy from your system until it runs extremely slow (in other words would it make my XP system run like Windows Vista).