Too old to start web programming career?

IMO the people who do the best are those that have more than one area of expertise. In other words: no business wants to buy software. They don't care about it at all. What they want is something that will help their business, and someone who knows both the software and the business is better able to connect the two.

BTW, ditch the PHP and Mysql and look at some other stuff like Ruby on Rails, Django, Postgresql, and, yes, Javascript. Some PHP won't hurt, but I don't think it's the "state of the art", although you can certainly still get things done with it.

I'll quote Drucker again here: "Concentrate on what you're good at." At 33, you've probably got a decent amount of experience in the business world, plus some additional formal education. Work on finding and solving problems that aren't apparent to the young turks just out of college, because they don't have the work experience. I'm 26 and I've had 2 salaried jobs, both in the computer field. There are whole industries that I've never worked in - those are probably ripe for a web solution, because you don't have swarms of college kids picking over every opportunity.

Don't expect to compete in the web2.0/social networking sphere. The kids that are 2 years out of college still have friends in that demographic, they grew up with the technology, and so they know more about both the technology and the market. Look for markets that all the young technophiles know nothing about.