Let's review for a minute. What's the most depressing, mood-altering force in the world today? No, it's not the "kitchen sink" pasta salad that TWA continues to serve to unsuspecting customers. It's…oh, wait. That was it.       Coming up against the new, tighter carry-on baggage allowance (reduced from 50" total dimensions to 47") depressed us further. Strict enforcement of the latest rules governing carry-on bags caused our "special FAA-regulation travel suitcase" just bought at Lands' End to suddenly turn into the equivalent of a steamer trunk.       The lesson of this story is simple: don't change your interfaces in mid-stream. Products have been designed to work with your specifications. Suddenly, you shave one inch in each dimension and what are you left with? A technical editor screaming at a clerk at a security checkpoint, 16 minutes before take-off, because the clerk was following a memo.       This concludes the programming tie-in portion of this month's editor's note. As a pleasant change of pace, we thought we'd review some of the excitement at this year's fall Comdex in Las Vegas.       Monday afternoon brought the official launch of Microsoft SQL Server 7.0. Now, you might think this would be incredibly exciting for us at MIND. Yeah, well. Being Microsoft staffers, we only got the white tickets to the event. Actual press people from the outside world got blue tickets, which they exchanged for handsome backpacks and other assorted gifts. Where's the justice? To soothe our hurt egos, we took a stroll through the stunning autumn garden at The Bellagio. Wow! Who knew that chrysanthemums came in so many rotting-leaf colors?       Monday night brought some interesting news. We were thrilled when our Microsoft compadres won a PC Magazine Technical Excellence award for their efforts on Visual Studio 6.0. (The 1% anarchist in us did, however, wonder what would've happened if another nominee in the devtools category, Perl, had won instead: the ensuing bloodshed would have been fascinating to witness.)       In a surprise, the iMac didn't the TecEx award in the new PC category. (Perhaps confused voters split their ballots between it, the Rowenta iron, and the Bissell carpet spot cleaner, since they all look the same.) The winner, the Toshiba Tecra 8000, wasn't present, so they had to send up a Tecra 780 to accept the award for it.       This year, Microsoft's developer-targeted Geekfest was held at a new attraction in the Las Vegas Hilton named "Star Trek: The Experience". This mini-themepark-within-a-casino was so completely nerded-out that it somehow did a full circle on the Geek Scale, and we actually didn't feel particularly nerdy being there. That is, until we spotted the guy running around the dance floor wearing a lampshade, repeatedly ranting "I...am...Nomad...must...sterilize!" in a sharp nasal whine. Or another guy standing near us in conversation with a Ferengi castmember about the technical inaccuracies of the Deep Space Nine set. Shortly thereafter, the sign in the men's room of the eatery snapped us back into the disease-ridden 20th century: "Employees: if you have diarrhea or vomiting, do not work in food handling areas." Yeah, we want you to snap on a rubber Ferengi mask and greet people instead. (And for heaven's sake, don't work the crapless craps tables whatever you do!)       Despite the impression you may be getting, we did see a lot of Windows-based products at the show. Arriving at McCarran Airport at 11:45 PM, one of the flight information display screens had blue-screened. On the way back a few days later, that screen was okay, but the arrivals board had somehow gone app modal on us. Look, you can't tell us it didn't happen. We have photos.       So when it comes down to it, there are two morals. Don't change your interfaces after people have invested in them, and implement robust error checking in any program that might be seen by a crowd of people. —J.T.

From the January 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.