Starwatcher2001

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.

I seem to recall that "Drain" spun up the motor on the floppy drive to create the spin dry cycle.

Amateur telescope makers can make glass mirrors accurate to 1/10 of the wavelength of light using very simple tools and processes.

https://www.bbastrodesigns.com/JoyOfMirrorMaking/Intro.html

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).

“what have you been up to lately?”

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.

https://archive.org/details/understanding-microprocessors-ra...

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.

You might consider humanism. It provides purpose and community, without requiring a deity.

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.

And vital to anyone visually impaired.

I'd put it back in the box and return it as defective.

> I am terribly afraid of death

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.

The TRS-80 level 1 ROM was 4k and the BASIC had the luxury of exactly 3 error messages: What? How? and Sorry.

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.

Wonderful resource. I may well get around to clearing my collection from my loft.

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 tried paper and log books for a long time (I've got half a filing cabinets worth), but no matter what system I used I couldn't always find what I wanted. (When did I last modify routine xyz, and why?).

Moving to flat ascii files meant it's searchable and has longevity as it doesn't need any specific tool or app. I can also carry the lot around with me - very useful on site.

Cheers.

I know the feeling. I'm 62 and I can't go as long or as deep as I once could, but I've changed my strategy over the years and although I'm not as fast as I once was I'm still pretty productive.

What I do is log virtually everything I'm doing in an editor window that I keep open all the time (one file per project/task). If I get disturbed by a call or a colleague, I can do a quick recap and get back to where I was. Likewise if I lose the plot several levels down my stack. It also helps if I need to switch projects for a while, or overnight.

It's like a running log of my thought processes:

- Need to add feature x to module y

- What docs have I got?

  - How to file in d:\projects\docs...

  - Log file from 13/03/2021

- What routines are involved?

- a,b,c...

- Looking at A

   - I'm thinking of adding a new parameter

     - Who else calls this?

       - Routine F

         - The mod would be straight forward there.

       - Routine H

         - This is called by S

           - This needs more thought, it might be chewy

     - What SPs are involved?

       - UpdateCustomerTable(CustName, Address1...)

   - I've backed up the database to ADB_20230110_1501.BAK so I can test.

What it does for me is offload the requirement to remember the previous levels and lets me concentrate on just the one or two things I'm looking at. As I come back up my stack I re-read what I was planning to do next. I use an editor (UltraEdit) which allows me to collapse things I've dealt with so I can see the wood from the trees.

I keep the log files, which go back over 20 years and can be invaluable next time I have to look at the same project months later. Reading the code AND my notes helps me re-build my mental stack much quicker. It also helps with any bugs that I introduce.

Good luck. It is possible to be productive at an advanced age, and still enjoy it too.

"First, very funny that with each comment the author is older."

Yeah, not quite as quick off the mark as you youngsters :-).

I posted a similar comment to yours in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27065714

I'm 62 and have been in this industry for 40+ years. The BIGGEST regret in my entire life has been the time I spent as a young man working stupid hours on "super important" jobs, and missing seeing much of my kids growing up.

I recall there was a whole paragraph written about the sound command and that 20Hz was the resonant frequency of a chicken's head, discovered empirically.

Borland did seem to be a playful company in contrast to Microsoft, their main rival.

This is one of my favourite sites on noctilucent clouds:

http://www.nightskyhunter.com/Noctilucent%20Clouds.html

It describes what they are, how they differ from normal clouds, and how to recognise them.

My worst hack was a bug in a small network I wrote to interface to some barcode readers and displays. There was a buffer overflow in the interrupt routine of my 8088 assembler code, which would occasionally miss an outgoing character.

The prompt should have read "Please scan card count", but unfortunately it missed the "o" out of the last word...

We needed to take delivery data from a proprietory legacy system. It already printed delivery notes so I spliced into the RS232 cable to the printer and took a feed into a second PC.

I then wrote a quick and dirty comms program to suck the data in, discard the unwanted control codes etc, and scrape the data into a usable form.

This was in pre-windows days, so the data going to a dot matrix printer was pretty simple. It would be a lot more chewy now I suspect.

Not what I expected, but that brought back memories. The LM380 (the 386's cousin) was the first analog chip I ever used, somewhere around 1976. I built a small headphone amp with the chip and a handful of discrete components on a piece of Vero board. I think the circuit came from the chip's implementation notes in the old RS Catalog.

I'm on the list to donate my body. Perhaps a medical student will gain just a little more insight or skill by practicing a technique on my body, and perhaps that will help them save or help a patient or two in the future. I hope so.

The thornier issue, having discussed my wishes with my family, is how it will affect them after I go.