To program. or ‘code’. 
I miss the days when I was a geek and spent hours tinkering with code, tweaking bits here, debugging there, improving efficiency there. I think I have coder’s-block, but lately I really want to get back into that mode.
I also want to actively use my livejournal. And create 3d stuff with truespace. I’m too lazy though damnit.
And I get distracted ea…wow, a dog with a fluffy tail!
Here doggy doggy!
Here woof!
Well, you can “tweak” and “debug” the fluffy dog. Not sure about “improving efficiency”, though - I never did get the hang of that one.
My girlfriend has a t-shirt referring her ability to get distracted. It says
"My Friends Say I Have ADD…
…LOOK! A CHICKEN!"
I hope I can only be so lucky, since I just started going to school again after 10 years.
I’m taking Web Programming and will be introduced to something called “Oracle” 
???
Oh, you mean “The Oracle”. Wow, you get to find out if you are the one! lucky!
Am I missing something or has Lobsang finally hit the wall?
Heh, Lobsang hit the wall several months ago when we trashed his place!
Man, I remember hack in High School when we were taught BASIC, and then a few years later in college when I took a Pascal class. Couple years later (on our new 386 PC!) I put together a program in Pascal to track my debts and account, balance my checkbook, a couple simple financial calculators that could give me the bottom line with regard to the amount saved/lost if I paid off my 15% credit card as opposed to renewing my Certificate of Deposit for another 12 months at 9% (God, remember those days!). Quicken? MS Money? What’s that? You mean someone might actually PAY for a program like this?
I know exactly what you’re talking about: CONTROL. I couldn’t have cared less about the finances at the time, I was getting off on making the machine do my will–much more quickly than a pancil & paper would do. Made a couple pretty good text versions of some of my better Dungeons & Dragons inventions. I have no idea what ever happened to them.
Just for grins I downloaded an ancient edition of Turbo Pascal maybe 6 months ago. Still have it. Haven’t touched it. When I’m not too busy for it I forget it’s there. It would be so much fun to make, I dunno, something to convert Arabic numbers into Roman Numerals.
/hijack
Congratulations, it’s one of the two “huge database programs” that are being installed in pretty much every company out there. The other big one is called SAP, there are smaller ones but these two take the biggest pieces of the market by far. These programs help with what’s called “ERP management” (Enterprise Resource Planning), which basically consists in realizing that… drum roll… every piece of yoru comany connects together! I’ve spent the last 3 years installing SAP in the company where I worked during the last 5, and I kept telling people “all these new connections you tell me are not new, they were there but you didn’t see them… think of the connections as bones and of SAP as an X-ray machine.”
It means that your school really cares about giving you what employers need.
/end hijack
Paid to get a BASIC after-class course (my parents refused to pay for it) while in High School, almost ruined my major for being a better programmer than the FORTRAN teacher, my thesis was a program to do statistics calculations that are now part of Excel. But my program did them better, it went both p->x and x->p and it let you choose several options (Excel doesn’t even give the correct definition of the formulas it uses).
Of course, doing a better job than MicroChof doesn’t seem very difficult.
Brings back memories of the check register that I wrote in DBase, on my first PC–it was a Packard Bell 386sx!