I agree!!! Haven't any of you heard of taking a mental break. I prefer to sew clothes for my grandchildren, make quilts or plant flowers on weekends. Fifty hours a week staring at a computer monitor is enough! I rarely check my personal e-mail on my time off. Now when I retire, that's different. I expect to upgrade personal projects I created in the past (when I was laid off).

I've noticed that many programmers are also musicians. There seems to be a correlation between people good with math and an aptitude for music. Not true in my case, but then I never had the chance to take music lessons as a child. So, musicians or accountants seem likely professions. The part of programming I personnally enjoy is debugging. To me it's kinda like solving a good mystery before you get to the end of the book. So maybe I would have been a detective. In reality though, being female, prior to the 1950's, I would probably have been a stay at home mom.

Where I work, stored procedures are not used, but for a different reason. Stored procedures cannot be checked into a source control system and maintained under version control. On very big projects with lots and lots of programmers and multiple versions of software that are backwardly compatible, version control is a must.

I was 21, my last semester in college as a Math major looking to get into programming when I could finally take my first computer course, Fortran. I had to type the program on paper tape, but the professor could never get the college computer(PDP 8) working. Luckily IBM hired me right after graduation and taught me DOS 360 Assembler language(this was the late 60's). I worked on the DOS supervisor (aka operating system) for the IBM 360/370 Mainframe computers written in Macro Assembler. Anyone remember what an "MNote" was??? Old and crotchety, but still codin'

Me, too. I typed my first computer program on a keypunch machine. Last time I used my knowledge of keypunch was when I figured out that the holes on my Federal Income Tax Refund check were my husband's and my social security numbers. I do prefer the multi-colored Windows monitors to the old green letters on gray terminals. Wouldn't go back to them if you paid me!

Remember Star Trek:The Next Generation? Wesley or Data reprogramming the software by poking buttons on a touch screen with nary a keyboard in sight. We've already gone beyond the imagination of the original Star Trek series (data stored on little square things that we now recognize as floppy disks). So, Microsoft, buy a set of ST:TNG DVD's and see what the future of software development should look like! Ah, well, I can dream can't I? :cool: