Lessons learned

One of my favorite quotes is from Mark Twain: "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way." It speaks to the value of experience. I am looking for a quote that I can use to reflect the benefit of learning from other peoples cat-astrophes.

Take this story in The Enquirer. There is someone who has clearly carried a cat by the tail and learned a lesson or two. My thinking however, is that I don't want to carry that cat by the tail. I think I can learn from his experience... and I hope that lots of people do.

When, oh when, will consumers punish these cash-grabbing companies for the games they play? When I get bad service at a store or restaurant, I punish that business by removing myself from their group of customers.

A few months ago, my Windows XP laptop blue-screened for the last time. This was the worst one yet, and when I couldn't recover and had to re-format the hard drive to make it usable I decided that I would no longer play the Microsoft game. I now have absolutely nothing installed on my laptop from Microsoft. Sure, there were some joke e-mails that I couldn't open because they contained MS media player files, but I look at that as yet another virus removed from my system. As a software developer, I can do everything I need to do on Ubuntu. I would encourage everyone who reads this blog to follow my lead on this. You'll be surprised how easy it is. I am continually amazed at how much free software is available from the Open Source community!


Sorry Bill, but you had your chance.