Don't even say your initial time estimate/guess out loud. It will probably become your deadline, and you probably assumed that most things would take a reasonable amout of time.

Bonus: Try to get onto projects that you think you can get interested in. Once on a project try to keep interested in it's success.

Why the fuck does microsoft feel the need to be different?

One small example is VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).

When calling a function iw does not allow you to use brackets.
Example: Funct (arg1, arg2) is not valid but Funct arg1, arg2 is.

If you want the damed brackets you'll have to use call.

Call Funct ( arg1, arg2)

because after the first function is called, functions within that as arguments need to have the brackets...