Having gone through some hand nerve damage over the years I found it useful to have more than 1 keyboard;
  having my hands in different positions during the day has proved useful to preventing further problems.

  Most of my typing is done on a Unicomp Model M, which is very much an IBM Model M. I type most
  reliably there although the I can type longer at the Kinesis models and probably would be almost as fast if there
  if I really devoted the effort to it.

I find the clickety-clack of Model M type switches cheerful and I need all the happy thoughts possible when
debugging Ansible scripts.

I probably wouldn't inflict that on people in an open office.

Unix wasn't the the only OS written mostly in a portable language. Among the others was Primos. In the early days it was Fortran 66 (e.g. if-then but no if-then-else) Writing a screen editor in Fortran was an interesting experience.

  Later on they used PL/1 subset G.

I saw the incident from my back yard. I was out there working on a Mr. Protocol column when I heard a particularly loud single-engine plane take off. What caught my attention was a sound I've only ever heard in the movies: the engine stuttered once, then stopped dead. I got up and looked to see if what I'd heard was really true, and saw the plane, with prop not moving, bank sharply in a 180 degree turn and start gliding back to the airport. I listened for a crash, since he was rather low, but didn't hear one. I'm glad he made the golf course and missed the neighborhood. (Look at a map: it's pretty obvious that the sole purpose of the Penmar Golf Course is to catch planes that don't make it. It happens often enough that I've wondered if they have course rules for playing around temporary obstacles with wings.)

  Does fiction include about 50% of the technical documentation available?

Two things helped me so far:

1) A Sleep Study

  I thought I was sleeping well because I fell asleep easily and stayed asleep. Nope: That
  was my body trying to make up in quantity what the sleep lacked in quality. I thought my problem was
  caused by too many electronic distractions (yeah some, but not most of it).

  You don't get enough deep and REM sleep, you don't have focus and your ability to remember new things takes a BIG hit.
  My problem was ridiculously easy to treat and I deeply regret spending several years not realizing I was being fuzzier than
  I needed to be for want of a couple slightly uncomfortable nights wired up.

  2) Turning off the router at night

  Also helpful: I put my home router on a timer. 10pm, BANG! No internet on anything but my phone, which is OK to use
  for short periods as an internet device and keeps me in touch if need be. Nonetheless it's much easier for me to decide to close
  my eyes now. That probably only works because my phone screen isn't very big.

Pity we can't have this for capacitors (or so I expect: too cheap a part). I've never lost anything to an exploding battery but exploding capacitors....yes. On the other hand, the capacitors I'm involved with have never been directly dangerous to my flesh.

At my job it was noticed I was getting increasingly conservative about the systems. Some of that was justified but eventually I found I had a medical problem that made learning new things hard; it had been gradually messing with memory....very very slowly so as to be hard to notice until it became obvious something was very wrong indeed and being fired became likely.

    Learning new stuff when you can't reliably remember what you learned the day before will rapidly decrease ones enthusiasm, even if one recognizes change as necessary.

    Before losing insurance, I started insisting on checking out possible causes. If you're lucky (I was) there might be a simple fix: diet change, CPAP, whatever. That's the good news. Not so good: the longer a problem goes on, the longer it may take to recover and one may never get back to 100%. Very scary but it's better to get back 90% than to continue to degrade.

    I'm convinced that for some significant fraction of older workers, this kind of thing can be some or all of their problem and I urge people reading this who have memory and learning problems they didn't use to have: check out stuff like sleep apnea, vitamin deficiency and the like.

Or as Gene Wolfe called it in The Book of the New Sun, "Fuligin, the color that is darker than black." And since Wolfe didn't make up any new words, that means "fuligin" is a real word from some older time.

All the crypto software I've looked into depends on big internal arrays of special numbers to do its work. If those numbers are compromised (which is what NSA contracted RSA to do, basically), then the whole end-to-end crypto channel is compromised.

And that's the problem. You can build an open-source hardware router with open-source software, to keep the possibility of hardware backdoors to a minimum, but if the basic crypto algorithm you use has been compromised from the get-go, none of it matters. I think that's going to be the next really difficult intellectual load to lift: vetting ALL of the current crypto algorithms in use today to make sure the algorithms don't have built-in compromises. Since that vetting has to be done by crypto experts, not just software engineers, that pushes the trust back up one step: which crypto experts do you trust?

It doesn't and yes that is sad....although Android was single-user-account until recently. I have wondered if that's a feature for Apple: makes sharing a single device trickier so each person has one.

Actually, it looks more like a DECtape.

Addons for web browsers (e,g. Certificate Patrol in Firefox, there are others) can clue you into certificate changes. Rather like Ghostery (which shows where stuff is loading from in a web page): it is an eye opener.

Very often low use ATMs still use dialup. If it's very slow to connect, that may well be the case. Very rarely I even come across one with the speaker on.

So a lot of us may have used dialup very recently indeed.

  I get your point but:

  In todays economy there are still a few pockets of stability and they tend to be in the
  places I put in this list. Not all positions, but some. E.g. We do hire some temps but they know they
  are temps and are about 5% of the workforce. I obviously don't work for Microsoft.

  These are places where they need (and more importantly: know they need) some working memory
  of how the place is runs. They are places where it is a big hairy deal to hire or fire certain positions.
  They are of a size that it is not unusual for exactly ONE person to know how to do a critical task.
  Even if cross trained, there is usually one (or maybe two) people who are really good at that critical
  task so you better have responsible people who would like to stay awhile.

  I am a sysadmin, I've been here for a decade, my most junior co-sysadmin has been here for years.
  No degree by the way, just a massive list of accomplishment. Me, I have a degree in a related field
  and fewer accomplishments.

  Even our web people have been here for years. That said, we all sometimes find ourselves working
  outside our original job descriptions from time to time. Money is tight but they want us to stay as long as
  we are doing a job that needs (or will soon need) doing.

  My particular organization has been through many expansions and contractions in the last century
  but makes extraordinary efforts to keep sharp people. My part is to stay sharp and grow. We have
  let go sharp people in the recent contraction, but we try to avoid it.

  In 2013 this is an exceptionally good situation to be in I know but these situations exist and are
  worth looking for.