Opus Musings

The world has changed a great deal. Back in the 70s at Rice I majored in math for there was no computer-science degree, and my speciality was compiler construction and formal languages and automata--quite related by the way. In 1980 I could say, with some justification, that I understood computers from the sub-atomic level of the semiconductors and dopants to the EE to the digital logic to the machine language to the assemblers, scanning, parsing, and code generation.

Ha. I'm a dinosaur. What keeps me sane, or as sane as I get, is that I wrote Minerva, the database I use to operate my office, and she's a work in progress. This weekend was enjoyable for I had occasion to add some fillips to her which will make me money by increased efficiency.

But as for making money programming, I did programming for people in Midland, Odessa and in Dallas in the early 80s and I found that if their computer goes down and a child gets sick, they would have to discipline themselves to call the doctor before you. If you do programming, you utterly must have someone to cover for you, because the damned things break in the middle of the night, and since people know that they can do a lot in a hurry, they use that as an excuse to procrastinate, and thereby engage in a high-wire act. When something goes wrong, there is utterly no hope of recovery by a manual means for the deadline is so near, and they will track you over frozen wilderness to get you to wave your hands.

Come to think of it, the best way I know not to be lost in the snows of Mt. Everest would be to take a job as a computer consultant for a small business like, oh, say, a well-service company. You could be 1,000' down an ice gorge and he would hire a Sikorsky helicopter to fetch you out.

I know what you mean about small company programmers! When engineering work was slow, my boss got me all tangled up with helping out a friend's comapany and they would call me DAILY with small stuff like reading me the error message de jour caused by internet trash like tool bars and spy-ware. Never mind I installed the best A/V Spyware software, they keet cancelling the updates because their computer booted up too slow while it was getting the updates in the morning.

The bad part was, as soon as he lent me out, we got tons of "real" work, and it took me 6 months to get them out of my life.

I think every company that has more than 5 computers just needs to bite the bullet and hire at least one person full time to have computer Guru in their job description and then have a consultant to help the Guru, so you can recover if you Guru goes AWOL.

I was not a small-company programmer. I was a lone programmer. Before the internet. Before the web. Before modems. Before system networking. Before LANS. An Apple II with a TI 810 printer. That primitive.

"The computer didn't work."

"What did it say?"

"I don't remember."

"What were you doing?"

"I don't remember."

Quite by accident adopting the Mac was brilliant. I am no longer locked off from the software to do anything that I want to do--anything at all--and can do most of it without a Winshit bubble, and I am resistant to getting such a bubble so that I can say in perfect honesty, "I don't know anything about Windows." I'm not telling any more lies any time at all. And I don't want to say, no, do it yourself. The women in my life are always getting on me for not saying no.

Of course, I could do what I do in land title, and say that I charge for consulting at my normal rate.

"Fine. What's that?"

"$250.00 an hour, four hour minimum, retainer of $1,000.0" My secretaries use that all the time and it works a treat.