Back in the early 90's we received a resume at my then employer in which this person stated they where the '#3 Clipper programmer in Rochester, NY'. Well, we HAD to interview him. He wouldn't tell us how he came about this ranking but it was correct! After the interview I told my co-worker that 'if he's the #3 Clipper programmer, then we are #1 & #2 and I'm pretty sure we weren't #1 and #2.' Always wondered were he came up with #3.

I only used them in college at that time for COBOL, FORTRAN and RPG. You quickly learned NOT to leave your card stack out or someone might do a 'driveby'. That's when someone would walk by, shuffle the deck, then put it back down without anyone noticing.

My companies MRP is the (very) old CA-Maxcim written in BASIC. About every other year some change needs to be made to the code. I grab my old BASIC manual and CA-Maxcim API guide and go to work. We use SQL Server, C#, etc. for all new work and have a 3rd party product to access the CA-Maxcim files but it's funny to think of a $80 million+ company core application is written in BASIC. It just works with no problems.

I once responded to the 'do you have any weaknesses' question with 'I believe weakness is an excuse for failure. You need to turn the perceived weakness into a strength.' I been working here almost 10 years.

I just graduated in December with my freshly minted BS in CompSci. I was driving my 1977 Dodge Aspen to meet my new wife at the hospital.. She was a new LPN. The radio broke in that something happened during the launch. I saw explosion when I looked into a patients room. The first and only time I've every gasped out-loud. That was one cancer, one total-loss house fire, putting one child through college and another into college, ready to celebrate 30 year of marriage to the same nurse. (Now a RN administrator) ago.

Don't they prefer width to their passwords?

As a person that lives in the Syracuse area I would be upset with that statement if only it wasn't true.

Golf is the sport of business. I've meet more people outside my range, CEO's, Presidents, VP's, etc. because I'm a good golfer. It's about getting face time with them and becoming comfortable speaking with them. The more you do it the better you become. They also start to see you as a 'real' person and not one of the 'computer guys'.

I had cancer removed from my left kidney back in 2010. Two and half weeks later I was back to work. Normal surgery would have required almost 6 months to recover. I was lucky that I had the doctor from Duke medical who wrote the book on this type of surgery perform the operation.

Delphi has been around since before Win95. Delphi was incredible popular and allowed all us Clipper developers a way into Windows development when CA dropped the ball with Visual Objects. Remember, Anders Hejlsberg created Delphi before C#. It is still very popular in most other countries besides here in the US. The choice of Delphi doesn't surprise me. Even though my company is mainly C#, etc. now, we still have a few old Delphi 7.0 and Delphi.NET applications running. In fact, I was just making a change to one before I read this article.

We just turned our Compaq Alpha box off about a 2 months ago. We went to a Virtual Alpha environment for our MRP. Nothing sexy, it just worked.

Just moved from Compaq Alpha box to CHARON VAX virtual server for our old MRP system about 2 months ago. I don't have to use it much, other people program on it a lot more than me. I just runs, runs correctly, and rarely fails.

But as I get into my 50's, I've found even that isn't enough and I have to watch what I eat and drink.

Lem: Maybe the meat blob's not taking in enough nutrients. I guess I could try and give it a mouth. Ted: I'm gonna say no to the meat blob getting a mouth. Mostly because I don't want to hear what it has to say.

Back in the 1990's my father's factory, they made train parts, was bought out by a German firm. After a while all measurements had to be done in metric. They had special classes to teach these men, most 40+ year old with high school educations at best the metric system. He said once you allowed yourself to change how you thought, it was no big deal. This was from a man that only finished high school because his parents wouldn't sign the paperwork for him to enter the USMC before he was 18! He's close to 80 today and still uses metric for most of his work around the house. I always felt if someone like him could be converted then anyone can learn and use the metric system.