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).