Thanks to all who replied, provided feedback, suggestions, and in general, camaraderie on my Pilgrim's Progress through a region of hellishness I wouldn't even wish on any of my former publishers
.
As I read through the various comments, my hopes were alternately raised, then dashed, over and over. As it now stands, I plan on implementing the three steps detailed in Reply #40 and will report back on my success (or lack thereof).
Sorry I did not reply sooner. My "health" (using the term as charitably as possible) really does suck, bigtime. That, combined with the arrows in my back (Yay! I'm a
pioneer!
) make stuff like this nonsense doubly difficult. Hard to imagine I used to be able to put in 30+ hour coding sessions, juggling yay many variables, procedures, data structures, and so forth in my mind, daring not to stop for such trivialities as food and sleep, lest I fumble a juggletoss and be forced to backtrack several hours to "find my place" again -- and then spend another few hours finding and fixing what I broke -- due to those "minor" nits I did
not manage to find. My sole luxuries were the toilet-breaks, taken when I could no longer leverage the keyboard versus the throne, because I knew I'd do so at the cost of the aforementioned hours of backtracking and inadvertent adventures in Instant Regression].
Yep, hard to imagine All That Fun, from here, a place in which getting out of my chair and walking across the room takes all the oomph I can muster.
Ironically, my health decline went exponential roughly in tandem with the death spiral of the Dead Tree publications industry. Towards the end, I spent more time on the phone ranting and raving at my publishers (trying to get paid) than I managed to spend writing. The irony is that prior to my only semantically-true "retirement" I ran my work computer "naked." These were the end days of the era in which a few
tens of
megabytes were "a lot of memory." The notion of multiple
gigabytes was unimaginable. My first encounter with anything gigaesque was the insanely huge TWO gigabyte SCSI drive I bought for the unimaginably low price of $900.
What with my work machine laden to the breaking point with compiler, IDE, word processor, various applications (those I used, and those I was developing), every byte and every cycle was precious. And, since I had no inclination to wade into the Inet's "red light district" I did not feel I was at risk for infection (I continued using Eudora Pro 3.x FAR beyond its "best used date" for the sole reason that it was strictly character-based, with what few browser-related "features" wholly optional, and thus, it was immune to scripting exploits).
The family machines, OTOH, which wife and child used in total disregard for my "paranoid" warnings, were strapped down tight with Avast! Free. And it did yeoman service.
It wasn't until some time after my career and my health disappeared below the cloud layer that I decided the Net had become so bloody unfriendly that it was completely nuts to run without an AV, at which point it went on
my personal machine too.
Well, time to quit rambling; I hate bracing for a slew of "tl;dr" replies.
