I'm Still Here, More or less.....

It seems like a common theme of some of my more recent posts has been an apology for not posting much lately. So far the on-going legal stuff trying to keep a land developer from forcing a road across my property has cost me heavily financially, and is continuing to do so. To make financial matters worse, a network service and maintenance contract I have had for years with a local county wide agency is not being renewed for next year. Their idea is that they will save money by not maintaining anything and wait until it breaks down completely, then hire someone to fix it. It looks like an impending train wreck to me, but time will tell. Regardless, the contract is not being done for next year. On top of that, ammo has gotten a lot more expensive, and I use a lot of ammo and bullets every year.

Needless to say, I need to get more bucks rolling in the door. Applying for a big grant, or begging for money are just not my style, so I may have to do it the old fashioned way, earn it!

A portion of my income has been coming from software sales of a software package I wrote (and continue to add to) several years ago for running a Washington State liquor store. The computer and financial reporting requirements for small liquor stores here in Washington are so strange that there is no generic point of sale and report writing software that will do the job. Not even close! The my program was written in Visual Basic for DOS, and used the VB DOS ISAM database engine for it's databases. To this day it works well, fast and accurate. It lacks the prettiness of newer Windows based software, but it's rock solid stable and will run well on the most modest of computers. The current cool aid is that DOS is somehow "Hard to use" and Windows is much easier, and that older versions of Windows that will run DOS programs are "No longer supported" by Microsoft. Have you ever called Microsoft for support on one of their operating systems? What a joke.....

None the less, the market is driven by perceptions, not realities. My current software works very nicely on any of the Windows 9x versions, but even with all the tweaking and fiddling, it just doesn't work as it should with any of the Windows NT flavored versions like 2000, XP, and Vista (spit). Sure, it can be run in a virtual machine, or even in a Windows emulator on Linux, but that makes the setup a lot more complicated, and a lot harder to fix if it gets messed up, particularly for the liquor store owner. They just want to run their store, not be a test pilot!

The bottom line of all this is that I'm pretty much working two shifts, seven days a week. During the "Normal" day I do my regular job, then grab a nap (mmmmmm, naps!) then work from after dinner until 3 or 4 am programming, writing a completely new version of the liquor store program from scratch, using Visual Basic 6 for the programming language. C++ would be a better final result, but the learning curve and development time pretty much rule out anything C based.

I've haven't had the time to follow all the blogs as I would like, and posting has been slowed way down, too. You do what you have to do to pay the bills!

In the meantime, if anyone knows of a piece of software that needs to be written that will pay me large amounts of money and which will take a fairly short amount of time to write, I'm open to suggestions!

On the other hand, KeeWee is planning to win the lottery..............