In order to avoid looking silly talking to myself when driving I obtained a passenger to chat to.

Ok, I really just wanted to buy a huge cuddly bear. Who can only just squeeze into the passenger seat.
About mark
At work, been working on Tandems for around 30yrs (programming + sysadmin), plus AIX and Solaris sysadmin also thrown in during the last 20yrs; also about 5yrs on MVS (mainly operations and automation but also smp/e work).
At home I have been using linux for decades.
Programming background is commercially in TAL/COBOL/SCOBOL/C(Tandem); 370 assembler(MVS); C, perl and shell scripting in *nix; and Microsoft Macro Assembler(windows).