Over the past 20 years the economy has lost over four million jobs. Although some of these jobs have disappeared because of increased productivity, most of them have been exported overseas to countries with low-cost labor such as China and Pakistan.

For me TechWave is primarily about networking, schmoozing, and hanging out with friends and colleagues. Up at 7 a.m. and to bed at 1 a.m. with a lot of events in between.

It's not sexy to be a computer geek anymore. A former student of mine, a 31-year-old Web designer, recalls a time in the late 1990s when she was lured by sugar-coated dot-com dreams.

I first began attending the annual PowerBuilder conferences back in 1994 when PowerBuilder was a new and revolutionary development tool. TechWave 2003 will be my 10th annual PowerBuilder conference, which makes me feel a bit old. We still have the DataWindow and PowerScript, otherwise PowerBuilder doesn't look the same as it did 10 years ago.

Happy TechWave everyone! The other day John Olson and I had a conversation with Karen Frederiksen, the new director for PowerBuilder. After brief introductions she asked us our opinion on PowerBuilder and its future; I think we scared her off.

I have a secret for you: most IT workers are concerned with the current state of events in our industry. I am as well. In these tumultuous times, most of us would like to find a bit of stability. I think I've found the job for us. Let's all become COBOL programmers. Before you think I'm nuts, go to an online job site and do a search on Java and count the hits. Then, search on the keyword .NET. Finally, pass in the word COBOL. The results will astound you.

Recently I was contemplating a situation at one of my company's projects and a parable that Jesus told came to mind. The parable goes like this. There are two men, one wise and one foolish. The wise man carefully chose a rock to build his house upon and the foolish man chose to build his upon the sand. When the rain fell, the floods came, and the wind blew, the wise man's house stood firm because it was built upon the rock. The foolish man's house, built on an unstable foundation, fell and 'great was its fall.'

Over the past six months I have been working with programmers with Visual Basic backgrounds. Usually this is a recipe for disaster - like getting dog people and cat people in the same room. With the .NET languages in full swing, and PowerBuilder transformed into a language we would not have recognized only three years ago, this whole thing about PowerBuilder versus Visual Basic has become outmoded and irrelevant. Now I would like to take one parting shot at the worst client/server language ever invented - Visual Basic.

My addiction began on Christmas 1997 when I received a PalmPilot as a gift. At first I fought it and continued to keep information in my head and even write some of it down in an ancient book called a 'datymr,' a rough translation being 'keeper of important stuff.' Those books have since become obsolete, replaced by electronic organizers that allow storage of thousands of pages of information, quick searches, and can be easily backed up in minutes.

A few days ago I attended the PowerBuilder 9.0 Launch Road Show, then spent the next two days at a TeamSybase meeting. These meetings are always a highlight of my year - we have about 12 hours of private, focused technical and marketing discussions with product engineers, managers, visionaries, and marketing and sales directors. Not only do we learn a lot about what is coming up, we also have the opportunity to influence the technology and marketing.

It's taken a while, but over the past six months a client of mine has finally gotten around to building distributed applications in PowerBuilder. In another life I've been building distributed applications for over three years; it's refreshing to do this in PowerBuilder. Perhaps it's a harbinger of things to come. With the pending release of PowerBuilder 9, there will be more opportunities to develop distributed PowerBuilder applications. This month I'll share a few useful design guidelines - actually provided by my two-year-old daughter Cassie.

The availability of PowerBuilder 9 was announced March 4 and the release was made available March 24. If you have an upgrade subscription or have prepurchased a copy, then you've probably already received it by the time you read this. I have the beta version, but haven't yet received the official final copy, though I'm currently watching my mailbox in hopeful anticipation of an imminent delivery. When I receive it, I'll put it to good use right away. I don't know what you're doing with PowerBuilder, but for what I'm doing, the new PB9 features are great!

Being an inquisitive teacher I'm always searching the Web looking for educational offerings. For the past 10 years I've made my living teaching at a university. When class is not in session, I take my show on the road and visit training rooms throughout corporate America.

Do you remember where you were on March 30, 1981, when John Hinckley attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan? What about on January 28, 1986, when the space shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff? When I was younger the question was, 'Where were you when Kennedy was shot?' Unfortunately, our generation has many more recent events we can ask that question about: the Beirut barracks bombing, the World Trade Center, and now the space shuttle Columbia.

He sits across the desk from you and you feel like you're talking to your father. According to his résumé, he started out on IBM mainframes and speaks fluent COBOL. You've never actually seen COBOL. He took a PowerBuilder class recently, but he's never used it on the job. He has more actual experience than the rest of your development team combined, but you're pretty sure he has no idea what HTML stands for. Do you hire him?

The dizzying whirlwind of terms we are bombarded with is...well...dizzying. Apparently, the age-old term 'data flow' was no longer capable of describing what we want to do with our data. Or maybe Sybase wants to take our data to the next level and make it really valuable, because we haven't been squeezing the last bits of efficiency and value out of it?

Tech workers, stunned by rounds of layoffs in the aftermath of the dot-com crash and the downturn in the economy, continue to hit a wall in a labor market that has fewer jobs, lower salaries, pickier bosses, and a new job requirement: soft skills.

2003 is going to be a great year. The economy is on a slow recovery, but it is recovering. That means more money for off-the-shelf and custom software, meaning more work for you, me, and others like us. Companies that have tightened their belts for a few years are starting to take another look at systems they shelved due to budget cuts. Hopefully, they'll untie those purse strings and help move the economy to an even faster recovery.

Something about the DataWindow gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, like a sleeping child with a security blanket. The DataWindow has been like a good luck charm hanging on my rearview mirror.

Wow, another year has passed. Time flies when you're having fun or you're busy. I'm both. Having fun is always good but being busy is both a blessing and a curse. As a consultant, I have very little employment security. Even those employed by consulting companies are only as secure as their current project. Being out of work occasionally is to be expected and, sometimes, the unemployment period can be long.

The first wave of wireless applications flopped badly. Does anyone remember the commercial that shows a young man lying on the beach with his PalmPilot? It goes something like this: a stressed businessman doesn't want to leave the office to go on vacation.

PB9 is looking good! Beta testing is underway and the release date is fast approaching. Officially, Sybase states that PB9 will be released in the first half of 2003, but all indications show that it will be in the first half of that broad time frame. Dave Fish, the primary PowerBuilder technical evangelist, is evangelizing at every opportunity.

I have to warn you, I've already had too much coffee this morning. I realize my comments this month are a bit on the edge and a slight departure from the norm. I have an idea for PowerBuilder - not just any idea, but one that will place PowerBuilder back in the mainstream.

Do you remember the old days of software development? It wasn't that long ago when we were developing software on machines with very limited memory and the disk capacity of my watch. With every line of code, we'd take careful calculated steps to conserve system resources. Any block of code that could be changed to squeeze out extra memory was analyzed and changed accordingly.

I barely mentioned TechWave in my editorial last month, 'Let Me Introduce You to ISUG' (PBDJ, Vol. 9, issue 9), though it was fresh in everyone's minds. Instead, I focused on ISUG and its value to the Sybase customer community.

Though it will be September by the time you read this, TechWave just ended a few hours ago. As with any conference, it had its high and low points, but for me the highs far outweighed the lows. I won't review TechWave in this editorial, but I do want to tell you about something that caught my attention. For full coverage please see Jerry Neppl's TechWave review in this issue.

Technology is changing fast, and PowerBuilder is changing with it. Back when I was coding with PowerBuilder 2, HTML was still on the drawing board, and open application servers, XML, and other contemporary technologies hadn't even been thought of. Sybase's flagship development tool has changed a lot since then.

Welcome to TechWave! I can't believe it's that time of year again. To be honest, I always struggle for a topic for the TechWave issue. I was going to write about 'Where Do We Go from Here' or 'PowerBuilder and the Future,' but both topics are overwritten and seem a bit predictable.

Summertime. Just the mention of the word conjures up thoughts of picnics, baseball, and long lazy evenings under the stars. Summer is also the season for interns. Now this is a touchy subject, and not just for our former president. All year we complain that our workload is too much to bear. If we only had some help, we could meet our deadlines. All year we dream of a seasoned veteran helper. An assistant who leaps over specs in a single bound. Management, always sympathetic to the cries of the proletariat, rewards our pleas for help with a 19-year-old computer science major. Not what we had in mind.

Repeat after me: 'I am a teacher. I am in the business of teaching.' Okay, you said it, but do you believe it? You may not think of yourself in those terms, but it's the truth. We are all teachers, in our personal lives and in our jobs. We, you and me, are in the business of teaching. Are you doing your job?

Most families have a member who bestows shame on the rest of the clan. For every 20 or so family members, there's a drunken cousin Ted, who has always been an embarrassment. He gets drunk at weddings and starts fights at his children's little league games. We all try to talk to Ted; we try to get him help and explain to the public that his family does not condone his behavior.

Many terms are born out of reality, based on observable evidence. When I hear the term silent majority I think of a large crowd of people, sharing some commonality, moving along peacefully without fanfare or press coverage. Maybe the commonality is a belief, like a religious or moral conviction, or maybe it's immutable, like race or gender. Occasionally, one in the group will speak out, saying something that resonates with the crowd.

Every five years or so a technology emerges that makes us reevaluate the way we write business applications. Guess what? It's that time again - time for our skillsets to be updated. Five years ago, the big wave was distributed programming. The current big wave, really an offshoot of distributed programming, is Web services.

Welcome to Chuck-A-Luck, put your money down and watch the wheel go round...round and round it goes, where it stops nobody knows,' a mantra I learned well at the Santa Ynez Mission fiesta when I was a kid. Every August it was a week of fun and excitement in the small town where I grew up. I was fascinated by the Chuck-A-Luck man and the mantra he repeated hundreds of times a day.

After careful consideration I've come to the conclusion that having two heads is better than having just one. While it may sound like I'm simply stating the obvious, in fact, most people have only one head.1 However, those who are blessed with two heads enjoy a measurable advantage over their single-headed rivals. This conclusion was affirmed in a headline-grabbing paper by two Princeton economists for the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled 'Are Two Heads Better Than One?'2

I starting reading PBDJ in 1995, just when PowerBuilder was becoming big. At that time, only seven years ago, PowerBuilder was the most popular client/server development tool. The buzz was incredible. Just mentioning the word PowerBuilder would draw thousands of developers, speakers, and vendors to conferences worldwide. PowerBuilder had arrived.

There?s no denying that the popularity of PowerBuilder has waned over the past few years. Every month I get e-mails from concerned PowerBuilder programmers, most of them worried about the future of the language. As you can probably guess, I?m a huge PowerBuilder proponent, but for all the right reasons.

Though I?m from California, I?ve been living in Utah for the last five years. We moved here for a project in 1996, intending to stay only until the project was over. That project ended over two years ago, yet we?re still living south of Salt Lake City. During the last five years we?ve had the opportunity to see the planning and preparation for the recent winter Olympics.

I recently received feedback from a reader regarding the content and direction of PBDJ. He was concerned that the number of articles on PowerBuilder client/server was decreasing. He is correct.

In the October 2001 issue of PBDJ (Vol. 8, issue 10), I discussed four things about Sybase that concerned me, and apparently many readers share these concerns. The good news is that Sybase is apparently listening (and reading). Even better news - they're doing something about it. Here's a follow-up to that editorial with Sybase's responses.