My friend from Canberra who I was planning to meet for lunch has needed to cancel. He is running late writing a report so is unable to meet up today. So I have some time free. This morning I have needed to do some project management tasks, working with one of my outsourced programmers answering some questions and doing some administration on the contract. Simple stuff really. He has completed about 30 of the function calls that I need implemented, which makes him about 10% of the way there – actually 40% of the way into this work parcel, but once that is done there are another 150-200 function calls to be implemented.

And if it is as bad implementing them as it was writing them then I feel bad. It is a lot of work, but it needs to be done. And I am paying a decent amount to the programmer, although I suspect that even slaves in Australia would get paid more. Maybe not, but certainly teenagers working in McDonalds work for more money. Welcome to the global economy. What makes it possible for me to sleep at night is that I ask for a quote, and when I get it I increase the price. In otherwords, get a good price but do not exploit the worker.

On another project I was giving some help to a friend who was trying to implement a drag and drop function in the software. Some quick searching yielded a page that described how to do this. It looks so easy to implement… I am sure that there are some gotcha’s but it looks easy.