we let some sales droids into our house tonight. for the software engineers in the audience, talking with them was very much like attaching input devices to a box running all its software out of read-only memory. You can send all the input you want, the program just keeps running. So I focused my energies on reminding them they had 90 minutes to finish. Of course they ran over. I told every droid that called or stopped by "I won't be buying windows the night you come over." Naturally they were surprised when that was still true at the end of their pitch. To be fair, the quiet one listened and thought when I pointed out their choice of 4 colors matched nothing in our house. I wanted to eject the blabby one and continue. But one good thing happened. Blabby mentioned installing windows at Perl consultant Randal Schwartz's house and said something like "I don't know anything about computers, but boy that guy really does not like Windows. Because of the security or something?" I blurted out "yeah, they made everything connect with everything in Windows, so it's less secure. It's like you added 10 doors to your house but still had the same budget for locks."