It is most enjoyable book I've read for a long time, and it fits the bill perferctly for you. It's short (240 pages); is broken into 12 easily digestible chapters; is stimulating, but you can doze off between chapters. Then, when you've finished you'll know a lot of eye-opening stuff about something you probably know nothing about now, but have many preconceptions. If you have any interest in history, it's a must.

It will take you mind off computers, completely!

I agree that alcohol can loosen mental barriers and sometimes lead to breakthroughs. I've never coded while drinking, but, sometimes, after a few beers at the end of the day, a breakthrough has just come out of nowhere. It's usually not how to code something, but more a "big picture" illumination, and I see a way out of whatever pit I was digging myself into.

I read recently the J. S. Bach did much of his composing while drinking in the evenings. In the morning he would go through his ideas and keep the good ones, and chuck the reast.

Obviously, this assumes that most of one's hours are sober. There is not a linear relationship between alcohol and productivity.

I save at least $40/week by buying cask wine, and cigarettes in cartons.

Do you mean "pathetic" in its vernacular usage, ie. "contempibly inadequate" , or in the traditional sense - that the victim's plight moved you to sympathy and tears, that your heart poured out for him. I trust it was the latter - that was my reaction! Where can I donate to the victims of coupon surcharges?

Agreed about windows viruses. OTOH, I have found that the Ubuntu desktop will just "freeze" from time to time, especially when running Firefox, and requires a power cycle to restart it. On the restart it may have a hard disk problem, and require a complicated command-line sequence to fix it. So the Ubuntu option isn't perfect either.

Often it's a simple as deciding to do something a better way. Instead of spending 10 minutes to do something the way I always have, I spend 30 to find a better way. Computers give oodles of opportunities for this, especially in the form of configuring, or scripting, something one does repeatedly.

Or doing a job around the house that I've been putting off, because I didn't want to work out how to do it (eg. how to poison a grape vine).

There's also news items on subjects I know nothing about, and am not normally interested in. I'll sometimes pick an item, and read it, just to learn something new.

I know people who have turned 70, and learned very little in the last 50 years. I take daily effort to avoid that fate.

When I worked on the Canadian Automated Air Traffic Control System (CAATS) Ada skills were at a premium, and I was recruited from Australia on $80,000, in 1998, so that's probably $150K plus in 2011. The project had nearly two hundred Ada engineers recruited from around the world, on similar, or better, salaries. Plus, it was a great project, great team, moderate pressure, and in one of the worlds most beautiful cities!

I shifted to C++ and then .Net, but I think the Ada market has kept high salaries, even while it has been shrinking, especially for those with a security clearance in the US.

I suggest that you try the old games under Win7. I have Need For Speed - Porsche (year 2000), which ran under Win98, but not XP or Vista, and I installed it in Win7 and it ran first time, with full graphics and force-feedback steering wheel. :)

I am reminded of a site called PlanetAll which I joined in 1997. It was quite like facebook was in 2007, but cleaner and more useful. The basic idea was that you used your real name, and connected with real people who you knew from high school, college, etc. It was a very nice, and it even worked for myself and a few contacts. The site did very well and were purchased by Amazaon in 1998, but Amazon shut them down. However, if they had started in 2003, rather than 1997, they could well be synonymous with social networking. It must hurt to be them. Curiously, they were a group of Harvard graduates.

I got one of my biggest nostalgia thrills recently when i installed NFS-Porsche on Win7 and it worked first time! It's the only computer game I really want to play, and i haven't played it since I switched to XP in 2004. It didn't work in XP or Vista. Now, I'm playing it on a beast of a machine, and it runs smooth-as-glass with all settings maxed - which I was never able to do previously. Nice.... nice... nice!

So, if anyone's got a pre-XP game which they haven't played for years, it's worth trying it in Win7!

I keep a laptop running with Ubuntu, and ssh from Win7 into it to get a console

I get a buzz from thinking that this 512MB machine is more powerful than the Vaxen I started out on in the 1980's, which had dozens of students logged on, and which I dreamed of owning when I became very rich. Plus, the console I get is full flavoured Linux, with (potentially) every software tool I could have used on the Vax - some of which might have cost 10's of thousands of dollars. I can get a compiler for every language I used then, in its latest version.

Best of all, it is often very useful, enabling me to do something I can't do in Windows

Seconded!

When I read the OP I thought that he had answered his own question. He wants to code, just because he knows he wants to. That's enough. It's quite easy to get into coding on his own home computer, in his spare time, as a hobby. Instead of watching TV in the evenings, he writes code and enjoys it. He suggested RoR as a potential learning vehicle. Great! It's self contained, so he doesn't have to learn a whole eco-system (compared with .Net or Java). It will be a vehicle for learning HTML, CSS, JScript and SQL, and Agile development. It's also elegant and fun to work with, and has several very good introductory texts. The OP is on the right track already, and just needs a few people to say - "do what you just said, sir".