I had a recruiter contact me about a COBOL --> Java project a couple of weeks ago. I don't remember the $100/hour part though, seems like that would've stuck with me!
I don't have experience with medical ultrasound, but I have built a few basic ultrasonic systems around a PC or a single board computer for structural testing applications. If you're not doing phased array ultrasonics you can build a system for under $1000USD, possibly less if you can use PVDF instead of PZT. The expensive part is the software.
I've recently started reading the dead tree version of the newspaper and I've noticed that only do I seem to retain more of what I've read vs. reading the electronic version, for me it's something along the lines of a focus exercise. It really feels like it's clearing out the cobwebs.
If SEP IRAs as mentioned above aren't an option, HSAs might be worth considering - after 65 they aren't restricted to medical expenses. I-bonds might be an interesting component for future retirement as well.
I used to more or less alternate between Github and Bitbucket but I've been using GitLab exclusively for the past six months. So far it's been a mostly painless transition. I've only had one hiccup, I had an IP banned for an hour or so but that's more Netbeans' fault than GitLab's .
GitLab itself is pretty fast if you host it yourself. Pretty much independent of scale.
GitLab.com, our hosted instance that you're asking about, is slow. Sometimes painfully so. There are several reasons for that, but as an end-user that won't relieve the pain.
We are working on it, hard. You can get an idea of that here [0]. As you can see, we've made significant improvements over the past months, but are now facing some setbacks with our hosting provider.
At GitLab Inc, we use GitLab.com exclusively for all our development. We have all the reason in the world to make sure it runs really really fast and stable. I'd encourage you to give it a try and otherwise consider running your own instance. It only takes about 2 minutes to set one up, less so if you use pre-build versions like our Docker containers or various cloud-platform images [1].
Page loads on GL.com can take a while, but I wouldn't say that I've found the actual pull/push cycle to be slow per se. I'd describe it more like "measurable."
Earlier this year I was working with an outfit that was on Java 4 for A Really Important Business Application. That said, they were looking at moving to IIRC 7 just as I was leaving.
