"Run in the sun, walk in the shade" was my jogging motto.

ie, when things are tough get stuck in, when things ease up, so can you.

I learned to program on a DEC PDP-8 (what you just described) serial #12. Compiling a Fortran II program was a three pass affair, running a punched tape through an ASR-33 (teletype machine). My first program wrote:

HI THERE
WELCOME

by drawing the letters on a small x-y oscilloscope (via three 8-bit DACs) using the z control to turn off the beam between letters. That was in 1963, I think
Shows my age.... Good times indeed, tw.

Oh, and you had to toggle in the boot program because the PDP-8 didn't have any ROM and its RAM was actually a core memory mesh of ferrite beads roughly 8" square for each 1024 bits of memory.

those things must have been around for a while then (or else my school got gypped into buying an ancient one) because I was still messing my diapers in 1963.

... a mesh of ferrite beads. you mean something like this?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/jeffzycin...ges/abacus.jpg:D

Core memory doesn't lose it's data when the power's off - it wasn't possible to leave the boot program in memory?

I don't recall why, but it wasn't. The code you toggled in contained the instructions for finding and accessing the tape reader on the Teletype i/o, so unless you keyed that in before shutting down, I suppose, that wasn't what was in memory.

Actually, the first machine I ever used was a Royal McBee LGP-30 which had an 80-track drum memory. Incredibly tedious to program. That was in 1961.

That said, I didn't mean to hijack this thread. Back to Advice!!

Marry an orphan. That way you never have to put up with boring in-laws during the holiday season.

'Tis the season for alcohol fueled domestic conflict :rolleyes:.

OK. Not to hijack the thread, but I feel I have the right of reply.
I'm 67. I started to learn about punches and verifiers in 1966.
Incidentally, the systems I worked on would all start up from a deck of cards. Anyone remember IBM's Job Control Language? It was said that the quickest way to write a correct JCL deck was to submit a blank deck and debug the error messages.

This topic has mated nicely with something that has been lurking in my mind of late.
It's probably fodder for another thread but I am becoming acutely aware of all the stuff I've had to learn for my jobs. Almost all of that stuff is absolutely useless today. Stuff we built careers on and nobody cares any more.
Don't get me started. (Assuming I could remember enough to be useful... :))

Over the years these have been at the forefront of my life,

"Question Authority"
"Problems are opportunities for solutions"
"Hold your enemies close"

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things just make you swear and curse.
When you're chewing on life's gristle
Don't grumble, give a whistle
And this'll help things turn out for the best...

And...always look on the bright side of life...
Always look on the light side of life...

My two centimes:

Your next misfortune will not be something that you have been worrying about, but something you haven't even thought about, blindsiding you. Ergo, if you worry sufficiently about something, it can't happen to you.

Worrying just means you are living your life as if the dreaded event has already occurred. It can cripple you when in reality it may never happen.

I know, fazstp: I have had much suffering in my life, most of which never actually happened. I was merely extracting the michael from myself and those like me.

Sorry to detract from the micky taking :).

a bit of spiritual wisdom (from people like J Krishnamurti, Eckhard Tolle, and etc): Spiritual problems occur when you take the memory of the past, project it onto similar future situations, and solidify that outcome as an actuality in the present. You resolve it (and this is much easier to say than do) by remembering/realizing that the past and the future only exist in the present as mental constructs, and the present is intrinsically fluid.

I usually think of it as a grammatical problem - you mix up the past tense, present perfect tense, and future perfect tense. "X happened in situations Y" becomes "X has (always) happened in situations Y" and morphs into "X will have (inevitably) happened in (future) situations Y", which prejudices any situation Y you find yourself in.

Of course, in many instances, this is simply learning from experience.

Though I think the learning process is easily corrupted by anxiety. The impact of an event is exaggerated and takes on a life of it's own. It consumes so much mental energy as to become debilitating when taken to extremes like phobias. I think it's also closely linked to the human tendency to addiction.

I agree. In many instances, anxiety leads to superstitious behaviors that have nothing to do with probable causalities.

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That’s a fascinating thought! Would you care to expand? :)
.

I guess the sort of mechanism I'm thinking of applies more to non-drug addictions, although anxiety can play a part there too in terms of self medication but that's another issue.

What I'm talking about though are addictions like gambling, shopping, the internet, porn. The object of desire takes on an exaggerated importance and consumes more and more mental resources until you give in. It rarely meets your expectations and then you regret your weakness and hit a bit of a downer until you begin the cycle again. The driving force is the desire and the underlying anxiety that causes. The fact that the object of your addiction failed to satisfy your initial desires is conveniently ignored. You're chasing some sort of mythological ideal that you can never find so your desire can never be quenched.

I guess the most extreme form of this mechanism is in OCD. The sufferer is compelled to perform some often nonsensical ritual to relieve the anxiety caused by their obsession.

Anyway, I hope I'm making sense here.