I feel compelled to weigh in on the college thing like everyone else. I should have taken a year or two off before entering college. In fact, I thought about it earlier, but when college time rolled around, it seemed just easier to go with the flow, and go to college then. Wrong!

I went to college for a year and a half. I will probably return to college within 10 years, but I will be going into it with a completly different set of goals and expectations. I know I can make a reasonable living in the real world as-is, so the only reason to return to college is when I decide I need to get formal learning and/or broaden out into other fields besides pure computer science.

I can't say for certian that taking a year off from education would have saved me from dropping out of college, but it probably would have led me to think things through better, and be more forceful in getting what I wanted to out of college. (On the other hand, I may well have missed being exposed to the net and linux for another year, which would have been a shame; I'm glad I was there for the tail-end of the early years of linux.)

Oh yeah. I just realized I have a really bad habit that's built up over many years of only skimming websites. Reading advogato in a non-graphical viewer seems to fix that. But I miss the colors...