Not too long ago, a friend told me he was quiting his day job to try going out on his own as a freelance consultant/contractor and asked for some friendly advice regarding wages and billing practices.

I may not have been the ideal person to ask, as I had never worked in the exact market my friend was going into. On the other hand, in my twenties, a few years back I did work as a computer security consultant.

Microsoft is a trainwreck. I used to abhor the desktop monpolist as an evil threat to standards-based open source innovation. But in the last decade they've been screwing up so badly I almost feel sorry for them. As much as you can feel sorry for a massive corporation that is.

One thing that puzzles me in particular is how Microsoft fails to grasp that their efforts to compete with Google in the search space are a pointless waste of countless billions and a lethal distraction that has allowed Apple to wipe the floor with them in the post-PC era.

I caught myself today repeating a few basic operations by hand what seemed like a zillion times. Over and over again. I didn't really notice it at the time but it was really slowing me down.

For example, after committing to tklbam I would create a tklbam testing package, copy the package to one of my test machines, install it and remove the archive.