The days are past when I could routinely wrap the clock on an interesting problem. If I did that now I'd be a zombie for a couple of days. Oh well: there aren't all that many interesting problems that come along in the day job anyway, so I make up interesting ways to solve the mundane problems. I wrote some REXX code not so long ago that builds and traverses trees to process an obscure many-to-many relationship in our database schema. One of my comments said that I was trying to see "how much of TAOCP I can remember".
If anybody ever looks at that code I'll bet a buck they won't know what TAOCP means.
None of the people at work my age know what HN is, and only one has ever even heard of Slashdot. Hell, I run the only Linux desktop in the whole enterprise - everybody else is plain vanilla MS-Windows. The kids who run the MS-Windows server farm, 20-somethings, have their own set of blinders on and if studying something doesn't lead to a Cisco or Microsoft certificate they won't bother with it. Young mercenaries, harumph. One of them admits to having heard about tomshardware so there may be some hope for him.
Sigh... nobody to talk to. I checked out a hackerspace in my area, but the kids there (don't mean that to sound pejorative, but I do have 30 years on them) were doing odd web hacks and Makerbot tricks and drinking cheap beer, none of which I found very interesting.
So I take out my creative frustrations at home, hacking at my personal machines. My darling this past year has been Clojure, and going to the Conj back October was an exciting thing. I kept up pretty well and discovered I wasn't quite the oldest guy there, so I haven't gone completely stale.
Have to pay a bit more attention to my body than I used to; I was immortal when I was 24, but now I've got those wrists and my liver to take care of.
(Man, they can't get those telomere therapies going fast enough.)