Haha! I'm in an organization where anything more advanced than RCS causes people to freak out. I'd love to give Git a try, but I'd need lots of ammunition to get anyone to even consider it. 

I'd love to hear anyone's experiences with Git (or Mercurial).

We're still on the fence. I want an iPhone 3g real bad but the monthly cost is too high for my cheap ass. It's going to depend on how much my better half wants one. A family plan with SMS will be $140/month and that will be the biggest non-housing expense that we have. Lots of Internet-on-the-go would be nice, but is it _that_ nice? I'm not so sure.

"As James Howard Kunstler has observed, there's no small irony in how when this country was less prosperous before WWII, the homes and public buildings were far more durable and aesthetically pleasing than those made following the boom years."

It's not ironic at all... increased post-War success meant that the price of labor increased and soon it was not affordable to create monumental architecture as the price of raw materials is increased along with the price of contruction. Crappy building is the direct result of our success.

Making products cheaper to manufacture in order to increase margin is the situation we're stuck with ('value engineering'). Sure it's soulless, but then again you are buying the same product as 10 million other people.

My hope is that Steampunk remains a DIY phenomenon. People who have more time/interest/artistic sensibility love modding their toys, whether it's making a Steampunk laptop, jailbreaking an iPhone, or rebuilding robots in their garage.

When bottom-line manufacturers start mass-producing soulless Steampunk-inspired goods the movement will die unless, of course, they actually Do It Right, in which case the goods will cost so much more that only a small slice of the market will be able to afford them.

I'm not sure I want to lug around an iron and brass laptop, no matter how cool it looks... .

Finally getting around to checking into this.

It looks like it will be a valuable conference. Count me in if you make any plans.

Yep. I don't know why I read that as MSA instead of DMA. Got the census on the brain I guess. No, not really. I was just being careless.

Where did you get the 50th ranking? The last US Census report I saw put PVD in the mid-30s. We definitely hit higher than our ranking on many scales though.

I usually use MySQL, mostly because it's ubiquitous. I've never had any problems with it that made me want to move to another DB. You can get a lot done without having to spend a lot of time optimizing. And the sheer number of MySQL installations makes it easy to find help and how-tos.

I use DB2 at work. It's OK but it takes a lot of effort to become really good with administering it. Also, the DB2 tools are confusing and hard to use. The commercial versions are pricey but I think there's a community edition now (probably an IBM re-brand of an open-source DB, like they re-brand Geronimo as WebSphere Community Edition).

Apple uses SQLite for CoreData so there must be something there, but I don't have much experience with it.