I think barring any other evidence, the past few days have provided some ultimate clues.

On Friday I locked my house keys inside my safe while changing the batteries on the safe. It wouldn't be a huge problem, except that I hadn't yet put in new batteries. And the safe's override key was on my keychain. Doh!

Now my camera, but thankfully not my PowerBook, is locked, inaccessible, inside the safe. Waiting for a reply from the manufacturer on some details I need to provide to get a replacement override key.

And today, not more than 5 minutes ago, for the first time ever, I spoke out the equivalent of a "stay off my lawn" to some kids. They were cutting across to another block by walking between my and my neighbor's house and then across his lawn and then my back neighbor's lawn. They'd have walked on my back lawn too but I have a plastic snow fence up for my dogs. I just told them it wasn't cool to cut through people's back yards and asked them not to do it again.

It's a new subdivision so there isn't any fencing up yet - once people put up fences it won't be possible to do that sort of thing anymore. I didn't yell and was quite polite saying pretty much what I wrote above. All considered I'm proud of at least that much, since it did bother me a bit to see the kids walk right past a window not more than 7 feet from where I'm sitting. Banging on one of my kayaks that's currently sitting under the window at the side of my house while making their way.

There are two sure signs of getting old.

1) Loss of memory
2) ... uhh, I can't remember the second one.

tanstaafl.

I felt old today when it struck me that Voodoo Ray came out more than twenty years ago.

Peter

I'm thinking that maybe losing mental prowess may be a feature of aging... I was getting SWMBO's laptop computer up and running for a trip to Mexico, and couldn't get the wireless optical mouse to work. It would recognize the button clicks, but the cursor refused to move.

After a bit of fussing and mumbling on my part, SWMBO came over and suggested that "Maybe it would work better if it weren't on a glass-top table?"

Doh!

tanstaafl.

Try hanging out on irc working on some new code for your PDA and realising that half the people whose coding skills you look up to are about 12.

When I was 12, coding skills were BBC BASIC, leet coding skills were 6502 assembler, and IRC was writing a letter by hand on paper and posting it to Acorn User. I sometimes dread to think what I'd've turned out like if the range and depth of coding opportunities available to today's consumer (or the kids of today's consumer) had been around back then.

Peter

Unfortunately the today's kids don't take advantage of the opportunities. Going beyond the "magic smoke" that makes products work takes too much time and patience, better move on to the Next Glittering Thing.

OK, see, I *have* become a Grumpy Old Man.

While everyone here is thinking of younger daze..

Did anyone else here ever encounter the cardboard slide-rule thingie that emulated a microcoded CPU, with assistance from the student (me) with a pencil and rubber eraser?

It was called a XXX-Bug, where I cannot remember what XXX was.. something like "Mik" or "JIT" or something.

I credit that amazing device with helping me understand how things really work under the hood, back in high-school. Up until then, I was going to be an electronics hacker (kinda like Patrick)..

-ml

Looks like you mean the Cardiac (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation). Pics which show the bugs. Build your own.

Holy McMoly. OK, thanks, that did help, now I don't feel old any more.

Peter

Wow! Good links, thanks.

That's definitely the right idea, but I don't think CARDIAC was the specific product we used. It does mention "bug", though, but otherwise the appearance isn't what (little) I recall from 1978.

Cheers!

OK, this is how sad I am - I actually have one of those!

I kinda guessed at that, Julf!

Thanks everyone.

I feel better now

That bad?

That good!!

Cheers!