[AccessD] You Guys make Me Sick

I guess this entire group senses that we're at a Senior Moment. I've
checked out several new languages to learn, and finally after much to
forget computer languages and instead learn Mandarin.

Currently, I have the basics down, including the tones, but I have a long
way to go before I could write something in Mandarin. From the alphabetic
perspective, learning the writing scheme is a huge leap. I read a wonderful
book called "The Man Who Loved China", about a man called Richard Needham,
who learned to read, speak and write Mandarin in *one* year. Subsequently
he became the world's foremost scholar on the history of China and Chinese
science and culture.

I am in awe of his first achievement, let alone the rest. I am in Year
Three of trying and still can barely carry a polite dinner-party
conversation. Writing about science or history in Mandarin -- well let's
just say I don't have that many years left.

Had I embarked upon this project when 20yo, I might have obtained different
results. At age 64. the learning is a lot slower, whether it's Mandarin or
.NET.

Given my age, I concluded that I am unlikely to be hired as a .NET or PHP
programmer; the only deep skill I have left is SQL Server and MySQL (and of
course Access), for which, fortunately, there remain opportunities. In SQL
Server and MySQL, I try to stay abreast; in Access I am a version -- soon
to be two -- behind. Staying abreast of SQL Server is itself is a huge
project.

The rest of the time I want to devote to learning Mandarin, reading The New
York Review of Books, various novels and non-fiction books (current reads
include "Reamde" by Neal Stephenson, "Ruby on Rails Bible", "The Hot Kid"
by Elmore Leonard, and the second edition of "The Selfish Gene", by Richard
Dawkins. That's the list for the next ten days; I read all of them a bit
per day.

I ought to add that I'm also trying to learn Alpha Five v11, and also
spending some time watching its tutorial vids and trying things out.

Currently I have a part-time gig done remotely, a few hours a week. It
boosts my income modestly and I am happy to devote so relatively little to
a project. Of course, this is a myth, since some of both my waking and
sleeping hours (unbillable) are devoted to reconsidering problems related
to the project. However, this is the life we have chosen. Develop or die!
Semper fi!

Arthur