I'm not sure I can afford to buy an iBook, though they are tempting. Just a little to early to adopt OS X as well, according to reviews. Probably by the time I graduate in 15 months, two more versions will have come out and people will be happy. Besides, I have a unix box to play with now that I have Red Hat 8 installed on my PII-266 (ferris).

As for software, I'm not so sure. I see the Internet being an integral part of all software, but I don't see current web development working out its problems for a long time. As a (new) developer, this doesn't make me want to spend my "spare" time on this platform. I think my time would be better spent doing more traditional application development, using well-known tools. The kind of stuff I can put on my resume as accomplishments. Developing for the web is complicated but employers don't put as much value on it as "real" application development.

As for languages, I am leaning towards Java and C# but I may end up doing some C++ as well. My problem with C++ is that it is not a very good language to use correctly (mostly because of pointers; leading to stupid typos and hard-to-find bugs - which is why Java was written) but I don't see companies abandoning it any time soon because of performance requirements. There's no harm in learning a Microsoft language given the company's popularity in the industry, but C# doesn't seem to be interesting people too much, so there may be no rush on that.

Unix development would be a hard road to climb, but an attractive one - doing something like that on your own time shows some real interest. Unfortunately, the learning curve is a bit crazy with all of the tools and it again is C++.

During all of this I will be watching how projects are managed and reading books about the subject. I think I'm far too inexperienced to argue the merits of processes. I've never even been with a project from start to finish! Being part of a project for a large part of its lifecycle is one thing I'm looking to do immediately. Something relatively small that I can contribute to and watch as it evolves.