Just some odds and ends...

Found a position were I work on maintaining an opensource project. Dealing with C code that originated in the 80's, part of the work is supporting a kernel module for filesystem support.

Old school IBM mainframe VM systems programmer. I've been working with virtualization since the late 70's. I still have some work z/VM. I've also been working a lot with xen.

Can honestly say that I've never personally written a line of COBOL, however I did write a BASIC to COBOL conversion aid using SNOBOL.

As a hobby project, I was involved with the development of the ICON programming language (I did the MSDOS port in the early 80's, and did a lot of work on making the interpreter portable).

I was an Alpha tester for one of the early PC C compilers.

I've installed Gentoo on a PS3.

Computer languages are a toolbox. Pick the language that fits the task at hand.

It helps to have a good understanding on how systems really work (at a machine level). Understand that systems are built up from some fairly common building blocks, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Learn how to read a raw data dump.