Have you ever tried pushing an envelope?  The envelope skitters across the table willy nilly, and it seems at times as though there might be something better to do with the envelope like putting an address on it or a stamp.

Well, it seems as though lately all I'm doing is pushing the envelope, which is one of two polite ways of saying I'm not getting much coding done.  (The other popular euphemism is to say that May is a "building month"). 

On the one hand I got through some blocking tasks on another business, so that was a win for our time and billing project this month.  On the other hand, I've spent a lot of time this month installing Linux and trying to get a decent development environment going there.

That's a fair amount of hassle to get around the fact that Ruby on Rails tests run slowly on Windows -- a whole new operating system, a windows boot sector gone (yes, I did do a backup first, but still), a whole passle of new development tools to install and configure.

I hope that all this high tech arm waving has taught me a lesson about the kind of software our clients want.  It'll be the kind that's a lot easier to use than Linux, with outstanding security and nightly backups.  When it comes to time and billing, you want to be getting the invoice into the envelope.  Pushing the envelope is strictly for the nerds.