1) I've been trying to convince friends and family that better times are close, in spite of the Republicans, who I expect will receive a just retribution and will slink back into their pits for the next 50 or so years

2) I was thinking about Bill and his success yesterday while building a W2K server. I once *hated* Windows primarily because it was bloated - to me, bloat meant that the development target was out of control. Well, Bill was right about bloatware - that hardware improvements would erase most of the bad effects of bloat. I really did not forsee how good hardware would become back in say 1996, my most strident anti-MS days. And, believe it or not, whoever runs Windows development seems to be hearing criticism - much more attention to standards and stability.

So, MS begins to seem like US Steel to me - a once very bad guy who is morphing into a typically slow-witted business leviathan, but one without explicit malice.