To expand on that, it's Arthurian in that it is a classic hero tale, a retelling of the archtypal hero tale that is seen in virtually all human cultures. Pick up a copy of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces for more details.

Well put. I'm only 41 but know that project management is not for me. I'm actually part owner of a small web development company, so part of my job is necessarily management, but it's my least favorite part.

You could "lower your expectations" in many ways however. If the OP sticks with project management, that would be lowering his expectations for how much he should enjoy his job. If he follows his interests and goes back to development, he might need to lower his expectations for future earning potential and career growth. On the other hand, a project manager who doesn't enjoy his job is unlikely to go very far, so he's probably better off in all respects.

I've been using Rhapsody for a while now, and am pretty happy with it. I work at my computer constantly and like having music on while I'm programming (it helps me get into the groove). I listen to a lot of music that I'm not inclined to buy. I appreciate being introduced to music that I wouldn't otherwise have known about, and I appreciate the fact that if I hear about a song or an artist I can almost always find it on Rhapsody and listen to it immediately. In other words, I get a lot out of my $6/mo (I should explain that I have a grandfathered account that was transferred from Yahoo Music years ago so my pricing is different from their standard pricing).

So for me, Rhapsody is great, and I have only been thinking about checking out Spotify because of some somewhat minor annoyances with the Rhapsody software (which may or may not be better in Spotify).

The real problem is not that it stays awake to record the programs you want to record, but that it is always recording whether you want it to or not. At least that's the way my Verizon box works. This allows you to turn on the TV, and if you happen to want to watch the current program from the beginning, you can rewind. I have never used this feature, and if I could turn it off I would. It's a huge waste of energy. It would be much better if you could tell it to not record anything (and power down the hard drive) unless it is really "on" or if there is a program you actually scheduled to record.

Surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, but there are many good open source CMS's that allow you to edit your website through browser based tools -- Drupal, Joomla, etc. My company has built our own CMS that allows wysiwyg editing of websites (which I won't plug). The point is, for the long haul and for a lot of reasons a browser-based solution is best. And no matter what happens to an open source project you can always continue to use the code and extend it for as long as you want.

and I feel fine.

From the consumer point of view "widescreen" sounds better, because it sounds bigger, even though it isn't. There's a reason they don't call it "shortscreen". And if they do actually think about it, it probably makes sense to many people to have a screen with the correct aspect ratio for watching movies -- even if they hardly ever do that.

From the manufacturer's point of view widescreen is better because it is smaller and cheaper to produce. I.e. a 15" widescreen display is smaller than a 15" 4:3 display, but they still get to sell it as a 15" display.

Small correction. When Google first came out, there were no link farms because Google was the first search engine to rank results based on the quantity and quality of links going to sites. That was their great innovation.

I think what they're moving towards is a time when end users don't care about version numbers at all, just like they don't care about the version numbers of websites. I'm sure many websites attach version numbers to development milestones as a way of organizing development. I do this for some websites I work on, but when we launch new features, we never broadcast to the world, "Check out version 8.1 of mysite.com!" If there is an announcement at all, it is focused on the actual features that were added.

Chrome updates automatically and without fanfare, similar to a website. I have lost track of the version number of my version of Chrome, and I don't see anything wrong with that.

Yeah, it really is amazing how every human category other than your own is always treated so much more fairly.

The technology is not quite there to build browser-based apps that can adequately replace desktop apps. But that's the whole point of the Chromeless project as I understand it.

I have, in the past year, switched from a desktop email client to Gmail. It is tantalizingly close to being a perfect setup. There are just a few things that don't quite work as they should (better desktop notifications, opening links in my default browser, for instance). If those things were fixed it would be great. Meanwhile, I can switch to another computer and have all my email on the go. If my computer dies, I have not lost anything. And it supports offline use (no 24/7 connection to the web required).

Okay, I'll get off your lawn now.

...until I read this response.

Google "sting" was interesting, but they made more out of it than it was.

But to call Google's experiment click fraud is just as juvenile. The fact is that Google had a really good point. Their "sting" used nonsense words, but they originally noticed something fishy when looking at results for a genuine query: tarsorhaphy, which is a misspelling of tarsorrhaphy. Google recognized the misspelled word, and Bing did not, but still returned a page with the correct spelling as the top result. They apparantly did so by piggy-backing on Google's results. Whether you agree with Google that this is an underhanded practice that should stop or not, Google was well within their rights to point it out.

I agree with you about the performances. The script was mostly good, but it fell into many of the usual melodramatic cliches that make me cringe. How many times have we seen the hero, after finally triumphing over adversity, receive a slow build-up of applause at the end of the movie? It's a very successful formula, but it makes me a little queasy every time I see it.

Honestly. As a web developer who works in the real world with real client demands, I have never worried much about targeting a specific version of the html spec. I use best practices when I can, and hacks when I have to. The real goal is to get a site working for as many users as practical. The sole purpose of a doctype in a web page is to alert browsers such as Firefox and IE to use their "strict" modes rather than their "quirky" modes. There has never been a time when I have been able to rely on writing to a standard and having it work in every browser I need to support, and it's unreasonable to expect that to change any time soon.

When my wife started doing video editing a while ago, I got her a desktop computer with a large harddrive, and I signed her up for the $5/mo Mozy plan. It's a pretty reasonable price, and we've already restored a couple videos she somehow managed to delete accidentally.

You don't need a powerful computer for photos, but it sounds like you do need more disk space. If you don't want to replace your laptop HD, you could get a large external USB HD.

Something else that I do, since I am the one that manages the photos (as opposed to the videos) is I put the photos on my computer and manage them with Picasa. I upload all the latest at a reduced resolution to Picasa Web Albums to share with family, deleting older albums when I get close to the 1GB limit (who wants a lifetime of photos to be public anyway?). And I occasionally sync all my photos over to my wife's computer, so that they get backed up to Mozy too.