mynameisasecret

This is spot on. Since teaching myself to become a programmer I've also gotten much better as a musician, as a mechanic, as an amateur woodworker and as as learner of Spanish. The combination of dealing with logic, language and abstraction stimulates the brain across all endeavors.

Mark Twain nailed it: "Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day AFTER tomorrow."

A quick visit to Harkers Island, NC would have shown the author that not ALL Americans have lost their British accents. There's a perfectly thick Elizabethan British twang applied to American language by most of the inhabitants there.