Been in software dev for 43 years. Done the 6am and 96 hour weeks. Then realised I'd missed a big part of my kids growing up, and once they were dead, spending little time with my parents. Too busy you see.
I'd recommend people really think about the costs.
One of my first "serious" electronic builds in the 1970s was a variable, current limiting PSU from Heathkit. (Advertised in Practical Electronics). Used that together with a breadboard kit to launch a life long interest in electronics. Still have the PSU in the loft and a handful of old circuits lovingly converted to Veroboard, or homemake PCBs made from copper-clad board etched with ferric chloride (until my mum got the vapours about me "messing around with chemicals" and stopped that route).
Be a little careful with this one. I asked a similarly worded question at an event over Easter got the answer "Burying my husband."
Thankfully the lady was good natured about it and we managed to pull the conversation around, but for a minute or two I thought I'd stepped on a landmine.
I think in future I might lead with, "what do you enjoy doing?"
My wife leaves the toilet door open when she's in there, which annoys me. One day I asked her why and she told me she used to do it deliberately when the children were little so she could hear what they were up to, and talk to them if they needed it. It's now just a habit. Makes sense now I know.
I'm doing something similar. I've decided at 62 to learn to play the keyboard and be able to read music. It's late in the day but I'm slowly getting there 30 minutes a day.
"That still mystifies me: The 6502-equivalent of an if-clause was branch-not-equal (BNE), but how did that work in reality? What's happening on the silicone then? How can a lifeless thing make a decision? Never really understood whats beneath the turtles."
My itch didn't stop after learning BASIC or machine code, I wanted to know what has deeper down. After reading the Zacs Z80 book, this was my next port of call and is still a damn good teaching aid on how microprocessors actually work, all the way from transistors, flip-flops, boolean logic, memory, address & data buses, timing, logical shifting, adding, multiplying etc.
It's still on my bookshelf and will probably get passed to my granddaugher if she shows any interest.
Nicholas Carr's book "The shallows - What the internet is doing to out brains" is a little old (2011), but an eye-opening read.
"One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book."
He's railing about the internet being a designed distraction machine, rather than youtube specifically.
That looks great. Bookmarked to have a closer look. I cut my teeth on a Model 1 Level 2 in 1979 and have been coding ever since. Still have my original working one, a spare and a model III in the attic. Probably a decade since I switched them on though :-(
The manuals were excellent and even showed a short machine code program to white the whole screen. Having used the "poke" statement in basic to do the same thing (which took around 2 minutes), I was blown away that machine code was almost instant. I taught myself assembler with the Zaks Z80 book
Did lots of hacks to the hardware, lower/case, speech synthesiser, motor control, added a parallel EPROM to hack the ROM code. So many memories.
>Replacement of nice physical controls with touch screens and touch panels. It's so nice to have tactile feedback when you turn a knob compared to pressing some virtual button.
That's understandable. I'm concerned for my loved ones and the impact it may have on them when I go, but I have no fear of death for myself. I have no memory of the millions of years that passed before I was born and expect to have no memory, feelings or consciousness after I have died. I just won't be here any more and that's perfectly okay.
Yup. Light pollution filters are practically useless now.
When I started observing 25 years ago, galaxies and nebulae were viable targets from my back garden, now I'm limited to solar system objects unless I load up my gear and drive a hour to my closest dark site.
Thanks for your site and message. Sorry but personally I found your article difficult to read. Your font choice and background, which seemed to me to overwhelm the text with little contrast, made it hard for me to see and parse the words. Sadly I think much of your message was lost on me. For reference I'm in my sixties and have poorish eyesight. I'm using Firefox. Best wishes.
Thats a really good point. In a similar way the number of available technologies gets bigger and bigger as we age, more choices, more to know and more things to fiddle with.
Decades ago the whole MSDOS machine was mine and my tools were an editor, C compiler and linker. Now you need to know a much larger number tools, frameworks and environments before you write a single line of code.
I use a heirarchy of folders and within them I create a text file for each main task:
\work\customername\StockSystem
MyCust001 - Interface not updating PickStatus.txt
MyCust002 - Add Stock Check Flag to ScanPullStock.txt
MyCust003 - Look at enhancing Batch Split screen.txt
I use the numbers as a quick reference within all my documents.
\personal\Diving
Diving book recommendations.txt
Diving gas tables.txt
\personal\DIY
Standard screw sizes.txt
Choosing new security lights.txt
Getting new consumer unit fitted.txt
I add the date and time to a line whenever I start, or after a break. (Pressing F7 on UltraEdit does this automatically). I can use this retrospectively to see how long things took.
I'd recommend people really think about the costs.