Fall '03, probably one of the most useful (and brutal) courses I took. MIT's CS program leans a bit on the the theoretical side, so classes like this serve up a good dose of reality.
Great article. A good % of the things I regret are situations where I wasted time/energy defending something I knew to be wrong, simply to hide the fact that I was wrong.
Thanks for the comments and feedback everyone! We've had a few rough patches over the past 12 hours, but we're up and running again (special thanks to the Dropbox team for their help). As a random aside, it turns out we're getting far more traffic from del.icio.us than TC right now.
I would take the first job. It will likely put you in more "if I don't figure this out, nobody else will, and we'll be completely screwed" type situations, and those can be great motivators for doing/learning things you never would have bothered with otherwise.
If you live in one of the qualifying states (CA is included), http://www.tonikhealth.com has fairly reasonable quotes for "catastrophic" insurance -- $77/mo for their base plan.