A bizarre thought occurred to me a few days ago. If my career were a video I'd think someone had accidentally sat on the remote!

Back in 2002 I had virtually no work at all. This was a bad time, Career and income were on "pause". It was costing a lot to keep myself and my family going without money coming in, and we nearly ran out completely. Eventually, after a year or so, I got another Java contract maintaining a large, clumsy and largely inept web application at BT - a different project, but strangely similar to the one I'd been working on before the crash.

Development on that project came to an end (maintainance was carried off to Mumbai), and I was back looking for work again. What came next surprised me - I was approached by someone I had last worked with in 1998, and asked to do some work on the current release of some software I had been involved with back on my first contract at BT in 1995. At least the project is now mostly Java, although the design and architecture still has some of that "mid 90's" feel to it. That work has now finished (for the moment, at least), and I am now working on software in C (not even C++) to drive serial port devices on machines running MS-DOS. This is disturbingly like some work I did around 1990.

If this trend continues, I'm looking forward to working with the GEM UI/Windowing system on an Atari ST, which I did from 1986-1988, random landscape simulations on a VAX minicomputer, like I did at university in 1985-86, or even Basic on a BBC micro or a TRS-80.