"I think he should dive into Visual Studio" says Dwight Shih.

I'll be honest, the computer causes relationship troubles. Every geek I know has to figure out how to balance their life so that the ones that they love don't rebel completely and throw the computer out the window.

Chris Anderson's wife (he's one of those guys who works at Microsoft) has a philosophy that sounds like a good one: "you have played video games on consoles and computers your whole life. You are now a fairly successful software developer. I'm not gonna mess with the equation."

My wife bought me a shirt a few weeks back that says "GeekisSexy." Now you know my wife's philosophy! :-)

So, where does programming and business mix? Well, I'm always looking for productivity gains. Look at the corporation today. We have data in Outlook. I have 2GB worth after just 11 months of working at NEC. We have data in SAP. Everything about our inventory, our finances, our customers, are in SAP. Well, except for all the stuff I have in Outlook. Heh. Then there's our intranet. Which is nice, but I don't know how to post to it. So, it's only one way and even there, everything has to be "approved" which keeps me from sharing info with anyone outside of my little group.

Then there are all of our communities (there's a TON of NEC knowledge in places like tabletpctalk and tabletpcbuzz.com).

All these places don't talk together. They have no knowledge of each other. When I update a contact for our biggest customer, say Ingram Micro, all the other "data islands" don't know about it. So, I gotta update that contact manually in a bunch of places. That's not very productive.

Add into it that I'm still doing a lot of things by hand (or with apps done by someone long ago who didn't understand our current business need). Things like when someone needs special pricing, I need to build an RFQ (Request for Quote) document. That should be much more automatic. And searchable. My system right now is a pain in the behind.

Anyway, I'm taking today off and taking my son to the park. More programming fun to come later.

GeekyChick sent me this: "Emusic.com is also a great music service that costs 9.95$ per month, and is unlimited MP3 downloads as well. I like it a lot, have been with them for almost 3 years now. I think Chris Pirillo is with them as well... AFAIK, he joined eMusic as well to get exclusive MP3 downloads from They Might Be Giants. Although they do not have a lot of mainstream artists, they have a lot of artists I personally like, and a diverse selection of music, spoken word/comedy, and much more."

Ron Green just sent me this: "the free way to be a C# expert." Lots of good stuff here.