As a responsible corporate citizen, I really do try to dogfood everything and anything that I can. Inevitably, after several months of beta this and beta that, my machine end up in a state of beta-shock, and can require a repave. I’ve been lucky lately though since my main dev machine has been going for a year now (but after several Office 2007 betas, Whidbey installs, etc., I have a feeling the days before a repave are numbered).

Another pitfall of dogfooding is that you run into certain "practices" that really make going through ordinary life painful. For example, this morning I tried to log into my bank to balance my checkbook using the latest Internet Explorer 7 bits. I was greeting with this wonderfully inspiring message once I logged in:

"We’re sorry. Washington Mutual Online Banking does not support your browser version. Please download a current browser with support for 128-bit SSL or call the Banking Team at 1.800.788.7000. Thank you."

What’s interesting is that the latest Firefox bits work without problem.

Update: I should mention that this is nothing new with WaMU - every time a new version of the browser comes out, the same thing seems to happen.