Only in Minnesota can it be 65, sunny, with no wind on one day and then have 35, overcast, and a 30 below wind chill the next. And, of course, the nice sunny day is the day before Halloween. Time to break out the parka.

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes. Original source is unknown but it's on a Living Colour CD. Maybe they wrote it and just had some British guy read it? Who knows. Anyways...

"We must never take these words too seriously. Words are very important. If we take them too seriously we destroy everything."

So here we go. It's time for Microsoft to force upon us another OS upgrade we don't really need. If you haven't heard about Vista you've probably been living in a cave and you got here by Feeling Lucky on Google in the first 5 seconds you've been on the internet.

Otherwise you've probably at least heard about Vista or read some reviews on it. Honestly I've read very few things about Vista because I don't really need to. All I need to know is this:

1. It will cost me $600 to upgrade my 3 computers to Vista
2. I don't have $600 to spend on OS upgrades

So I won't upgrade. It's as simple as that. I didn't upgrade to XP either for the same reason. I have XP at work. The first thing I did was turn off that eye candy XP interface and go back to the classic look. Then I switched from the Teletubbyland background to something cool.

(Side rant: If you're still using the Teletubbyland background please change it. Pretty please?)

Then I realized that it really doesn't do anything that Windows 2000 doesn't do. There's a few changes but on a daily basis I can't tell the difference between my Windows 2000 OS at home and my XP OS at work.

So why the hell do I need Vista?

I imagine at some point Microsoft will stop supporting Windows 2000 and force everyone to upgrade. That's the point where I look hard at the future of Windows and how much money the ongoing OS upgrades are going to cost me when my family has 3-4 computers. Unless Microsoft drastically changes their licensing and fee structures for their OS it's starting to look more and more like Mac OS is going to be a viable alternative.

Shortly after creating my blog I started wondering when I would actually have time to keep it updated. I started writing my entry on code ownership and realized that it was going to take a lot longer than I thought. I remember back in college I would mock the journalism guys for taking the easy major the same way I would mock the business school guys. I still mock the business school but I have a whole new respect for the journalism guys. Writing articles is hard. Writing good articles is even harder. And writing good and interesting articles seems like a monumental task. So, kudos to all you journalism folks. I have a whole new respect for you.

Ok, so I finally did it.

I created a blog.

It was something I have considered doing for a while now but just didn't know where to start. But then I had a great conversation with a good friend of mine about code ownership and decided that would be a good place to start a blog. It's something I feel fairly strongly about and I think I have some views worth sharing. Which I'll do in another post.

This blog will mostly cover software development topics -- design, process, etc. -- but will also cover anything else I feel like writing about. I'm interested in a lot of things and I find curious or interesting things about the world almost every day. Things where you think to yourself "That was odd!" or "Wow. How many times have you seen that happen?" or just simply "WTF?".

Hopefully I'm at least mildly informative or entertaining enough so that I get somewhat of a following. If not, oh well. I have no formal training in writing. I never took writing classes while in college. My vast experience in writing comes from everyday experience. So I'm not sure what to expect. At the very least I'll get a few things off my chest so it might have a therapeutic value for me outside of any value that you guys and gals might get.