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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.


If I recall correctly, the drive light stayed on, the drive was spinning, but the whine came from the speakers, and moved to a higher pitch partway through. It also smoothly ramped down in "RPM" (frequency) at the end, which is not a thing that the floppies could do.


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.


Everything, literally everything from the root of this thread until the parent comment applies to my wife too. I am so relieved that I can stop worrying about it now.


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.


Never, ever, too late. Heard a story of an 80 year-old who said, "If I'd taken up violin when I was 60, I'd have been playing for 20 years by now."

Anything you can do that brings you satifaction or exercises your brain and keeps it sharp is a great thing.


I did the math on the 10,000 hours theory once and concluded that this gives me permission to start something late in life. If you went as hard as you can you could reach expert level in a dozen things in a single lifetime, if that was your goal. It's perfectly reasonable for someone to expect to be able to achieve two or three. Even if they consider their youth 'wasted'.

Used to know a guy who was as old as I am now when he took up Go. Took him less than ten years to reach a 3 dan rating, which is on the edge of where common wisdom says you need to start as a child to achieve better than that. But any time he wasn't working, he was looking at Go games (and I suspect sometimes when he was working). If he started 5 years younger or lives long enough I expect he'll disprove that rule.

Of course it always helps if you're a polymath. There's a lot of social friction involved with picking up something that is expected of 14 year olds. If you can teach yourself you can skip over a lot of that.


I met a woman who picked up painting after she retired. After a few years she got pretty good, and after a decade she got really good, and by the time I met her she was in her late 70s, happy as hell, and making more money painting than she ever did during her actual career as a teacher.

She was doing a lot more than 30 minutes per day, but it was pretty comforting for me to realize that nothing's really stopping most people from continuing to learn and grow deep into their twilight years if that's what they want to do.


My library has a Great Courses piano course available through hoopla/kanopy. It's really well done!


That's awesome!!


"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.


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