It’s my very proud duty to inform all my readers of the most fantastic blog in the universe (after Lo’s, of course). Her name is Mary Smaragdis, middle-aged mother of three and Marketing Babe for Sun Microsystems. (She thinks that people still think of her as a "Babe" or "Sun Hot Chick" at her age quite odd. Especially when, as has been the case recently, she’s old enough to be their mother!)

The reason that Mary is so wonderful is because she runs a giveaway every Friday called Friday Free Stuff – she calls it "Explicitly and without apology a marketing vehicle" – and it is. But I completely endorse it. Why? Because I won last Friday’s give-away.

Mary gave away a really sweet Leather Bound gadget case – filled with lots of things, USB flavoured – and I really wanted it in a geeklust kind of way, considering I didn’t know what it did! I made a half-hearted entry, and failed to win on every count. No hardship, I never even expected to win anyway – it’s all a bit of fun.

But, anyway, Mary had the same (or deeply similar) gadget case again up last Friday and I felt compelled to try again.

This time I had more ammo:

I recently had a VERY brief toy with mono and the CLR runtime, it rocked even in the unstable state it was in, I had it all up and running very quickly without any issues I couldn’t work around. Around about the same time I also had to work with Microsoft’s .NET runtime and VB.net (it’s C# without curly braces, mkay – bring back VB6, and I never thought I’d say that) and hated every moment of it.  Now Java can be a bitch to work with but when you’re trying to play with the cutting edge stuff – as can most stuff, but compared to both of these (mono and .net) – it’s really quite easy!

So, anyway, with this new-found evil for C# I plowed on and wrote my entry. This time, I won!

So, that’s why Mary rocks  

I’ll tell you all more about what’s in the case when it gets here! (Then you can point people at my lovely review next time you get another one, Mary, mkay? )