Don't have an engineering background. I just teach myself. And it was so much easier back in the 80s when there weren't as many programming languages or mobile devices. Guess that's why I'm a mailman.

JJ You mean the web languages? There have not been that many new programming languages in the last 20 years or so that are actually used. I think I can count them off my hand.

Stag, Ergo Cogito Sum <-- Trust me this aint latin. Now if you said it sounded like Enochian I could understand better :-P

I went to college for programming back in the late 80s and early 90s, so stuff like COBOL and Fortran and all that stuff came easily to me, but I dropped out due to lack of money. After that computers became more of a hobby (and second tier to gaming). There has been alot of stuff or variants that I've come across since then, and lost alot of my initial desire for programming over the years, but when I get an itch and find the time I try to teach myself what I need to learn.

Mostly, though, I'm lazy and I enjoy jobs where I don't sit behind a deck all day. Even now I'm doing some supervisor work for the Post Office, and I'm good at it (or so my "employees" tell me), but I enjoy actually delivering the mail so much more. That and the fact I gained another 10-15 pounds since last September.

You should check out Ruby and Ruby on Rails (A Web Framework for Ruby), its a fun language.

I thought you ran a store?

Also, if you know COBOL, you could get a lot of $$ right now since most of the COBOL programmers are retiring and most of us younger programmers don't wanna know COBOL.

I knew COBOL. I haven't done any programming in close to 20 years now.

I do own and run a store, evenings, that I own with my wife, her mom and her brother. We all have day jobs otherwise we couldn'ta fford to have a store (it barely keeps itself open without having to support us). We like to joke a Hobby store is like a hobby farm. We do it for love, not for money. It's a really tough time now for retail stores in the last year I think something like 4 game stores in MN have closed, and over twice that have open and closed in the same amount of time we have been in busness. Fortunately we have enough loyal customers who believe in keeping the store open so they buy from us instead of off the internet but those YuGiOh guys who buy pretty much everything from WalMart make me want to throw things.