General

Here's my shortlist of fave fonts for editing source code. Some of these are built in to MS Windows, others were supplied with Corel Draw 8 (my favorite illustration tool.)

I prefer monospaced, but some times I switch to a proportional font for variety - modern editors do a pretty decent job of dealing with them.

Every time I get a spam snail-mail from a bank or credit card company telling me I'm 'pre-approved' for some loan or another, I keep in mind that the prefix 'pre' means 'before' - so, pre-approved means that you are not yet approved. Your loan is in the 'pre-approval' state: before approval.

It's a word game. A weasel-word. A slimy form of disclaimer - so, if you don't have adequate credit, they won't be legally bound to give you a loan.

What is Microsoft? What position does it occupy in the consumer's mind? When you think of Microsoft, what's the first image that pops into your head?

In my mind (as a software developer) Microsoft is a company that provides the Windows OS, and software development tools and APIs for it.

My mental image of Microsoft does not include:

[ed. note: this was originally posted on 6/30/2006 09:21:00 AM]
There were stories going around about Microsoft having the ability to 'pull the plug' on XP installations if Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) is not installed on a user's machine:

Herb Greenberg's blog at Marketwatch.com has some funny, albeit harsh observations about the recently-announced Mac OS and iPhone delays - doing a little 'spin translation'.