[dba-Tech] Inside Out

Sorry Rocky, but you missed the point. I am no longer in search of clients.
Unfortunately, "I try to get out but they keep dragging me back in." (c.f.
The Godfather). I do not want any new clients. In the immortal words of
Greta Garbo, "I didn't say I want to be alone. I said I want to be left
alone. There's a difference."

And that's where I am currently at vis-a-vis app-development. I don't want
any new clients. I will continue to service my existing client-base to the
extent that they wish bug-fixes and enhancements, but after that, all I want
to do is study the chess-games of Bobby Fischer, and learn more about
several other things such as Genetic Algorithms, and to hell with YAFOES
(yet another friendly order entry system). I'm done with all that. I want to
spend my retirement years on interesting problems such as GAs. I'm done with
writing practical solutions. I have enough to live on, and I don't give a
fork whether company A or B or C lives or dies. I just want to play chess
and backgammon, and hang around here because it's intellectually
stimulating. The  fact that I've completed my last client's last requests I
deem liberating. Clients be damned!

Now I can finally have fun programming! I've earned it. I'm never going to
give up the habit/infatuation/addiction, but at last it's on my own terms,
rather than some deadline imposed by some client. I'm far from wealthy, but
have enough to get by; no fancy vacations in far-off countries, but I've
already been to 32 countries at last count, so that's not much of an
imposition. And now at last I get to decide what to think about, instead of
being harnessed into some horse-collar mandated by some client.

I don't mean to demean anyone still fighting in the trenches. All I mean to
say is that I began the fight in 1983, even before DOS, and I'm a veteran
who is at last ready to enjoy his pension. That doesn't mean that I'm taking
the paddle out of the lake; quite the contrary: at last I get to choose the
lake. Trust me on this: the lake ain't another order-entry system or any of
its variants: been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Now I want Real
challenges, and I shall cite a couple of examples:

1. Genetic algorithms: I have been fascinated by this discipline since its
inception.
2. Teleological chess: I hate the Deep Blue brute-force paradign and remain
convinced that there is a better way than Deep Blue.
3. Sudoku: already solved that problem; the most difficult Sudoku problem
(by general consensus) takes my algorithm 1 minute to solve. The average
problem in newspapers takes seconds.
4. GO: now that's a serious problem, and I've only begun. and have so far
nothing much to show.
5. Musical dictionary: this is the problem that most fascinates me. This one
is tough. Assume an input device such as a keyboard or an input-MIDI file
etc. The problem is to discover whether its principal melody, second melody,
harmonic themes etc. have been previously used. Ignore key and signature and
transposition, and discover that Item A is a retrograde inverted
transposition from key xxx to key yyyy, with xxx played on cello and yyy
played on keyboard, and still detect it: that one is a bitchin' problem!

These are some of the problems to which I shall devote my retirement years.
I am fully cognizant that I won't make a dollar from any of their solutions,
and I don't care, and that is the freedom of retirement!

A.

A.

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Rocky Smolin <rockysmolin at bchacc.com>wrote:

> What kinds of clients would you look for then?  What kinds of apps to
> develop and what platform/language?
>
> Rocky
>
>