You're not in the worst situation you could be in.
Our industry and the career options of our field change so fast, you have to learn new stuff each year, no matter how old you are. If your company keeps you around and basically pays you a salary for you to learn programming, what's you problem? Obviously they trust you and your valuable enough as a progger to them.

Most productive code is of low to mediocre quality anyway and no one cares, as long as it's finished before the deadline, so don't sweat it.

Good luck and enjoy your new career.

I don't anybody says that Religion is bad in general. The problems people righfully have with religion are with those institutions who claim ownership and superiour gouvernance over all things spiritual. These institutions are more or less companies selling a branded variant of some spiritual concept, muddying its true purpose for their own benefit and for nothing more than mere material earthly power. This is particularly true with todays abrahamic religions.

The katholic church for instance, has actually very little to do with the original teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and simular worldviews, but actually is one of the last institutions still holding on to old roman pre-christian concepts (one guy at the top telling everyone what to do, power over kindness, etc.) - curiously exactly the concepts Jesus was up against (and crucified for). It's only that these religions then highjack their leading figure, like for instance Christ to introduce concepts that are actually anti-christian (superiority of white people over afrikans back in the colonists times for instance). You see simular effects in non-abrahamic religions aswell, like buddism, if not as intense.

It's very much like Microsoft claiming to do the best for software in general, and actually doing the opposite while at the same time trying to discredit those who truely care about software (the FOSS community).

I consider myself quite rational, but I personally also do like to entertain the thought that there is a non-physical world that follows other rules than the physical but is interconected with it. I like Seneca, the stoics and the Zen Buddist concept of relitivating the importantness of certain physical/material aspects of my life and I read spiritual and philosophical literature regularly. Am I deluding myself or indulging in whishfull thinking? Couldn't tell, allthough I'm quite sure I'm not entirely doing so. Does it make my life more bearable and raise it's quality? Does it raise my performance in dealing with the things I have to deal with? Does it actually help me see things more realistically *without* me starting to panic? Definitely!

On the premise of prescribing 'religion':
Prescribing 'religion' - i.e. spiritual teachings, liturgy and lifestyle is of course the first thing you should do with someone who is overly depressive without much reason to. I wouldn't use any "religion" or confession that is bloated with false claims and constraints, but I don't see how ready Stoic lectures and writings or regularly excercising some shinto or new age ritual or meditating could to any harm. In fact, I'd say precisely helping you to handle everyday life would be the actually true function of religion.

Every human being needs one of four things, that can also be intermixed: Family/Clan, Art, Religion/Spirituality, or regular encounters with untouched nature. If those aren't there he/she becomes mentally ill, depressive or takes drugs as an unhealthy fifth substitute.

If you life is in a rut and you have no friends, no time or resources for praticing art and your surroundings are unnatural and mainly functional, religion is indeed the thing you should turn to. Albeit not neccesarly any big brand of religion, that could be counter-productive.

My 2 cents.

I have to admit, that actually *is* sorta cool. Imagine, you can probably repair a bit on that computer with a well-bent paperclip. When everything goes down the drain, this thing will still be up and running, maintainable and you will be able to build your own spare parts for it using a regular toolbox and a soldering iron.

Then again, my very first computer, a PC 1402 Sharp Pocket Computer from 1986 with cashstrip printer is probably like a bazillion times faster and more powerfull than that thing. It would probalby take less than two weeks to replace the entire workflow with a single cheap-ass current programmable calculator and you could add some features along the way. That makes it quite strange too. Cool, but very strange.

My 2 cents.

1st Rule on scaling: If you have a scaling problem, you don't have a problem.

Wrong approach. Yes, many have said it and I'll say it again and it will remain true for all eternity.

If you think you've got the next Google or Facebook up your sleve - well so be it.

Build your app, use regular common sense when doing it and the rest just happens. I've handled upwards of 20 Million active users with user tracking and billing with a few thousand hits per second per product in an internet gaming company and I can tell you that when scaling with a product has to happen - it will, and if server duplication is done with Perl magic by a handfull of admins, cloning one drive to the next using a checklist on a wiki.

The thing you will need most when you have to scale is money. The time building the perfect scaling system from scratch from the get-go is a million times more worth if it is spent on building business contacts and getting VCs and Angels with good contacts and/or cash to invest on board. If your app isn't a total mess of spagetti code and ignores the most basic of architectual rules your better set for scaling than most large apps out there. For example: Click around Ebay for a few moments and try to imagine what's going on beind the scenes there, and think of how it grew and how and when Ebay started out. I'm currently working on a financial app for a *very* large international bank. The apps foundation is 8 year old copy-pasted & slightly modified grey goo of Dreamweaver HTML/JS and anti-object oriented PHP 4, an app so bizare it defies any description - and yet it is the key product of the shop and beats the competing Java app in terms of usability and flexibility.

Anybody here will tell you that scaling a PHP app to a billion users won't work and you should forget PHP right away. And yet Facebook is here and they're scaling pretty well as far as I can tell. They even got a few devs working on a PHP JIT compiler (HipHop) the last few years. Again, as you see: Scaling problems are *exactly* the kind of problems you want to have.

Bottom line:
Make it work, make it beautifull and worry about scaling when it happens. All else is nonsense.

P.S.:
Premature scaling worries aside, in terms of technology today I'd go for Nginx and JavaScript in the Front and Back, using Node.js as the server-side technology. It seems stable enough to build something serious with it and you've got one PL for both server and client. It's like in the good old days of Netscape Webserver. ... My 2 cents.

Good luck.

Chromebooks are specifically designed for that demografic/generation of users that confuse(d) Google and the Web (the internet userbase that roughly joined around 2005) and those that came after that.

Google is spot on with this strategy and I know at least a handfull of users for which Chrome OS would be one of the better choices for an OS.

After quite some hefty turmoil in the last few months I downgraded my long-term lifestyle expectancies a bit and took on a job as a web-developer (LAMP, HTML5/CSS3/Ajax - the whole lot). The job pays 10000 Euros less than my last one but is in a neat small company building and maintaining PHP applications for a boring but solid vertical market. ... Anyway: The the companies boss has a policy of providing a top-grade work environment. I got a brand new 27" iMac - we (5 employees, 2 part-time freelancers) all are using either 27" iMacs or MacBooks with 27" Tunderbolt displays, we all have topg-grade Duo-Back Chairs and, this is a very good thing I've come to notice in the 2 weeks I'm there - we all have a desk that can change its height electrically. With the simple push of a button we can raise our desks to standing height, which is a huge plus when your stitting in front of the computer 8,5 hrs a day. Have a little presentation or demo-discussion for one or two co-workers? Raise your desk to standing height and all gather around for little stand-in. ... I actually find it fun to work at the office.

Bottom line: Better work environments pay off almost instantly. If you want to do some good, you'll try and get this across to your boss.

My 2 cents.

Add a working zero-fuss DB Structure and Data Sync to some DB Tool project. Sequel Pro, the web-based PHPmyAdmin or something else. That's a feature desperately needed.

My 2 cents.

Age discrimination will be a problem, as people have mentioned allready. Allthough, "discrimination" against people who simply aren't good enough is going to be your problem aswell.

However, if you want to move to the desk doing smart work, I'd suggest you learn to programm stuff that is close to your current field. What are those 'building products' you talk about? AC, climate controll, heating, intercom devices, etc.? Those need programming and network admining don't they? And the probably have specialized programming environments and programming languages you have to work in to make them to the special stuff, configure them and so on.

You should simply get into doing stuff closely related to you current field. You should now the brands and vendors of 'building products' that need regular programming and maintenance and your experience 'in the field' should give you an extra advantage on top of that, if it only is bragging rights and resumee fluff.

Moving from QBasic into stuff like serious web or mobile development is something you probably would fail at. And trust me: It's something you do not want to do anyway. Doing semi-embedded stuff coming from the MS-DOS times on the other hand is just right up your alley.

Good luck.

My 2 cents.

I believe, and have been believing for more than a decade now, that we are in a transition into a new era, which would best be simply described as an age of cyberpunk. Giant quasi-national corps and mainly administrative nations ruling large chunks of regular ultra-economized life with the fringes morphing into different, post-industrial citizen societies alltogether, with areas where money isn't worth as much as reputation or skill or simular non-monetary values such as honor or membership in some group like something quasi-religious or something. Human interaction will be paid for, stuff and convenience will come free.

Pick your standard William Gibson or Neal Stephenson novel on the subject and you get the picture of what I mean.

The simple fact is: we are living in paradise with a bizare abundance of things quite a few of which would have been considered impossible in the 50ies.

The shit our field has been whishing for humanity all along has finally arrived. You can get computers that would have been considered borderline magic two and a half decades ago and would have taken up a mid-sized 5-story building; so powerfull, lightweight, easy to use and with software usefull and manifold beyond comprehension for a single individual, so cheap, they can be payed for with 4 days of regular manual unskilled labor!

Just last night I saw a poster of an offering for a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 Wifi for 250 Euros. Two-hundred and fifty fucking euros! I payed more than 2 times that much for my friggin Sony MD700 Minidisk player back in 1997, a device so old-school in its tech and so single-purpose, it close to appears to come out of the early steam age compared to my HTC Flyer.

The truth is we've basically just about arrived at where we wanted to go. 5 years into the future algorithms and large computing clusters won't just be interpreting language, they will be translating it, and quite probably in real time. Tablets will have print resolution, weigh less than a book, have 15+ hours of uptime of the grid, be forever connected for a token fee and do *anything* you would want to be able to do with such a device ... and then some. And they will cost as much as a round-trip to the next big city.

Jobs are dropping left, right and center because they aren't needed anymore. Imagine when paper documents have finally moved out. An entire field of jobs will simply vanish.

I made compareatively big bucks developing in Flash/AS3 5 years ago. Proprietary lock-in stuff. Neat, but adobe totally missed the touch-screen dev train. Tough luck. Now I'm lucky if I even get one gig in that field every two years. I'll probably be doing specialized vertical market PHP and webdev the next few years for less money and after that, who knows? Even the LAMP stack is so old-tech I feel like in an entertainment programme when developing for it. ... Maybe afters this I'll become a massager for old lonely ladies and do touch-screen development just for the kicks on the side.

Bottom line: The world our field lives in and caters to is changing. Fast. We're seeing to that ourselves.
It's the age of cyberpunk, plain and simple. That's what I call it anyway.

My 2 cents.

The answer is "Yes, these new-fangled non-pc devices do cover everyday tasks for the layman user and thus are a good full-time replacement for a PC."

Personally I'd check out the Asus Transformer and the Chromebook for devices with KB integrated, and the Google Nexus and the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 line of tablets.

Remember to clarify a few things first:

Printing required?
Data transfer / backup required?
Optical media reading required? (Audio CD, DVD Video?)

There are solutions for 1 and 2, especially on Android, some involve using WiFi for data transfer, so your mom would maybe need some kind of external WiFi HDD or something.
If optical media is required, you'd have to look carefully at what's needed and search for an apropriate drive. ... Dunno if WiFi optical drives exist.

All those things aside, if your mom isn't a developer, designer or about to go into video editing or something and doesn't need a full M$ Office suite because her friends all use it to send stuff around, then a modern tablet is a very good computer.

My 2 cents.

There is no such thing as intelligence, only interest. - Richard Feynman

Choose the field, then the language.

In terms of the field, there are two basic things you can aim for: One of the popular fields (Web, Mobile, Games) or the big-bucks||safe-job fields (ERP, non-trivial Databases (big-table or big-company), *nix maintenance, embedded systems, specialized vertical markets, Enterprise Client/Server, etc.)

It depends on what you want to do.

Once you've chosen your field, you choose your technology and then your PL. For Web and Mobile, using anything else than free open source technologies these days is silly and pointless, for Games and all the other stuff it probably will be some proprietary closed source stack/technology.

The PL itself should be an official independant standard either way. Which PL it will be in the end depends entirely on the choices made above.

If you want to make a solid and future-safe switch, I'd stick to the chosen field and become an expert. Better jobs that way. ... Unless the technology goes entirely belly up. Happens rarely, but was the case just recently with Flash/AS3 - which, for example, got me by the balls, since AS programming was my main source of income until two years ago.

Good luck.

My 2 cents.

Actually Agent Smith compared us to a virus, rather than a microbe

It's the smell!

Give him a new mail account. And tell him not to trust anything, even if you sent it. And tell him that mails are basically electronic postcards that can be easyly searched, scanned and manipulated, even the sender and the reciever. If he's still with you, tell him a bit about mailheaders and look at them with him. ... Although I personally wouldn't bother going to much into the details of email, they are insane anyway, in my opinion. (The Type A email security incident you describe pretty much proves my point).

Clean his system, give him a fresh thunderbird install with a new account and - if he fell like doing this - set up an encrypted mail communication between you and him. Explain which part of that makes it a sufficiently secure means of communication and which part can still be compromised (his, your's or anybody elses system).

If he's a person who's usage patterns are covered by Ubuntu, offer to move his system to that. ... I got my daughter an ubuntu netbook for her birthday. The amount of hassle-freeness is refreshing. It does suck that sound and mic are causing trouble on Ubuntu 12LTS, but that's a minor tradeoff for the lack of headaches I've gotten in return.

Good luck.

... I think I'm switching to Haiku.

*Tadum* *Crash* *Thud*