There's a ton of DB research on the subject. Read up on CJ Date and the third manifesto as they're what most of the "nulls are bad" papers are based off of. It has been a while since my database theory courses but the best reason I remember is dealing with joins. Since joining on a null value gets dropped from the resulting set, you may miss data. For instance you may think that you have 200 records in the database because some complicated join returned just 200 items but you're joining on a column with 100 nulls, thus you miss 100 records. Hence the idea that people should try to avoid nulls. That said if you reorganize the database to avoid that, you almost always have to do left outer joins or unions or some other crazy approach to get all the data anyway which reintroduces the nulls... So instead your DB people went the default value approach. It's actually clever as long as it's well documented that they did that.

I switch between podcasts and music through out the day. It's pretty much the only way that I'll stay on task, otherwise I get bored and surf CNN or something else. Also I can't listen to instrumentals, there actually needs to be lyrics (or in the case of podcasts, someone talking obviously). As soon as there is silence I stop typing for whatever reason.

Since I didn't see someone make the suggestion, you may want to try downloading the Desktop edition of Ubuntu (since it has the GUI by default) and adding the server portions. Either way, you're not going to find it is as simple to set up as Windows Server (although the driver issue was odd, as I've only run into one or two drivers on either system that wouldn't install). Also, as someone else suggested, definitely try out Windows Server 2008. It's a huge improvement compared to 2003 (heck, I've even been running it as my OS on my development computer).