Me Too. Whether we succeed or fail -- but especially if we succeed and I make good money -- then I'm out, too. I'll still write code, because I can't not write code, but it'll be on my own terms. We've talked about the possibility of starting a business that has nothing to do with computers. Oh, and there's that novel thing, too. :-) [The .NET Guy]

People switch careers all the time.  I've got a good friend who ditched a 7 year career in sales to become an electrician's apprentice, and hasn't been this happy in years (that's about a 66% pay decrease, incidentally).  My wife's uncle got sick of driving a cement mixer around Denver and for the last 2 years has spent 6 months out of the year working at Mc Murdo Station, Antarctica.  His wife joined him last year after getting laid off from Compaq, and is back again this year.  There's lots of fun stuff to do out there, no reason to spend your entire life in front of a CRT.  Justin's case is pretty common, I think.  I have a friend from high school who did some sort of chemistry related thing for a few years before med school, and our family doctor was a nutritionist for several years before med school. 

I'll probably be working until I'm at least 70.  I agree with Brad, I like to create stuff.  That's the reason I drag myself out of bed and endure the lousy traffic on I-25, on the off chance that I might build something today.  But just because I'm working at 70 doesn't mean it'll be on a computer.  Although I found out yesterday that if I stay at Galileo until I'm 70, I could get a mountain bike for my 40 year anniversary!!!

Guitar work. ...now I just need to buy a new power strip so that I can connect both my cable modem and the amplifier at the same time :)[Commonality]

Now there's a sentence that Jimi Hendrix never had to say :-)

Computer naming schemes. Have you ever noticed how IT companies tend to have coherent naming schemes for their servers? It has always amused me.

In the office all our machines are named after Muppets (Gonzo, Scooter, Beaker, Bunsen, Cookie, Grover etc), our servers are all named after Greek gods (Zeus, Bacchus - son of Zeus etc).

At my university, the servers were all named after composers (Mozart, Liszt, Handel etc).

What wacky naming schemes do you have?[rebelutionary]

In our data center, they have a very simple naming scheme.  For example, one of our production web servers is named E2PSRIGWSWB01.  I don't remember what the E2 is for, it might be the rack it's located in.  Then P means production, SR means Server (as opposed to a storage device, I guess), I means I don't remember (or something like that), GWS means "Galileo Web Services", which is the system it's running, WB is web server, and 01 is the ordinal.  Simple, huh?  That's what happens when you turn your data center operations over to IBM Global Services :-)

Web Services Threat Detection

A while back in another life, we considered the idea of a real-time threat detection system for our web services. The idea was we could build (or buy) an infrastructure component that could analyze the incoming bit stream, detect anomalies, and react appropriately. [Greg Reinacker's Weblog]

What makes this harder is that the caller can disguise the request using character or parameter entities, or by using a processing instructions or xsi:include.  The usual stuff when dealing with XML, you can't just do a binary compare to see if the document matches a signature you know about.  Talk to Eugene Kuznetsov at DevCon, he went over all this stuff at the last one.  Steve Loughran also mentioned that they had some interesting security holes to patch in the system he worked on, I think there was one that allowed a caller to download the server's password file by handing in the right XML request.  Man, I wish I was going.  Dang customers!  Can't they wait a couple weeks to start beta testing?