BL> Do you come back to stuff you did a few years ago and think:
 BL> "Jeese! I must have been a genius! This is really clever."

 BV> Nope. More often than not, I say to myself, "what the fuck does
 BV> this do." Or, "How the fuck does it do that."

  It must mean that you haven't reached your peak, yet. I get the:
"What the fuck does this do... how the fuck does it do that?" but when
I finally work out what I did, I think: "Bloody hell! It's brilliant!
How the fuck did I think up something like that?" It always seems that
someone much smarter than me did it.

  Old age sux.

 BV> The _real_ clever stuff was in the scheduler and tosser I
 BV> wrote. It was an absolute work of art and it was doing all the
 BV> real work and only calling Telix to do the actual transfer. Not
 BV> that dissimilar to the way that we use Telix with the TinyPoint
 BV> stuff. Anyway, the chain store went broke and the other guy who
 BV> was writing most of the code didn't get paid for a large part
 BV> of his work, etc.etc.etc. I had been paid for my part, so I
 BV> didn't bother about it and promptly forgot all about it.

  He, he, he. Brenton got paid up-front. My hero!

 BV> The source code I received looked to be a year older than the
 BV> executable. I compiled the program and had a quick play with it
 BV> and it looks like the source code is in better shape than the
 BV> actual program this poor bugger is using. Hmmmm, I thought, "I
 BV> wonder if somewhere along the track, the blokes writing the
 BV> stuff installed old software in the expectation of not being
 BV> paid." A bit more playing and I am now thinking that this is
 BV> what has happened.

  He, he, he. I've done that. If you think the prick may not pay you,
you give him something that will cause him nothing but trouble, and
he'll have to come back!

 BV> In short, I have a customer who has one version of the program,
 BV> I have the source code to another, but I know that there was
 BV> another. Obviously we have to start work from the current
 BV> source code, but the guy only knows what his problems are with
 BV> the executable and I don't remember any of it. It's gonna be
 BV> fun :)

  I absolutely *hate* that. When I was writing books, I'd lose
a chapter occasionally. I knew what went before and after, and it was
possible to rewrite it, but I always had the feeling that I'd done it
better the first time, as I remembered bits and pieces of the original
text.

  Is it possible that your mate is holding back the good stuff? I know
what happens when a company goes bankrupt: everyone grabs what they
consider to be the treasures. Might he not have grabbed the latest and
greatest - and flogged it off to someone else?

Regards,
Bob
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
@EOT:

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