A major drawback of Ruby and Python is that they are slow. Ruby 1.9 is much, much faster than 1.8, and Python just keeps getting faster as bytecode improves. But compared to the C family of languages, you might as well run the calculations by hand.

I've been looking into wider-audience programming, namely through Microsoft's .NET interfaces. That sounds dirty to UNIX programmers, but honestly, it's kind of handy.

Tangent: iPad

Before I get started, I just wanted to get it out there: yes, I bought an iPad. That stupid, consumer-oriented, plus-sized iPod Touch? I've got one in 32GB form. And you know what? I don't regret buying it. Nothing's quite the same as holding the Internet in your hands... in a form you can actually read it in (without the need for a mobile site). 99% of sites I go to work just fine without Flash, thanks to the video codecs and HTML5 tech that Apple stashed in this device.