Sorry. I just take on the odd bit of contract/consulting work when I have a bit of spare time from my normal day job. Regards, Steve

Egads! I just realized that I've been churning out code for a living for nearly 25 years now! The engineering field that I work in (railway electrification design) is fairly specialized, hence the generous rates. Sorry, I'm not familiar with any local recruitment agencies, so I can't help you there. Regards, Steve

G'day Nathan, I'm in sunny Brisvegas and work with C++ in the engineering and foodservice industries. We run our own small software company here, so I mostly work for myself, but on the the rare occasions that I take on contract work, I normally charge $150-%200/hour for short term work (say a month) and drop that down to 'mates rates' of around $75-$100/hour for longer jobs. Feel free to give me a call (07 3300 0059) if I can be of any help. Regards, Steve

Another vote for Help & Manual here. We've been using H&M for a while and like it a lot. It has a few minor quirks (what application doesn't?), but it's dead easy to use and has proven to be very stable (not one crash and not one byte lost in two years of fairly heavy use). Support has been excellent and the price is great. No affiliation here, just a very happy customer. Steve PS I don't think Help & Manual supports UNICODE, so that might be a show-stopper for some prospective users. (Please check the H&M web site rather than taking my word for this.)

Today (Sunday) is a national day of mourning in OZ for the Bali victims. Steve

> Personally I'm waiting for the episode where the Croc wins. Aren't we all? :-) Steve

G'day Amit, I lurve cooking. I just wish I was better at it. After 13 years of writing cost-control software for Chefs, I've managed to accumulate >100k recipes in my test database. When I've got the time I dig up an interesting looking recipe from the database and have a crack at cooking it. Not always a sucess, but always an adventure. Steve

G'day Hadi, Requerying a recordset is functionally similar to closing and re-opening the recordset without some of the overhead. It's useful for those situations where you open a recordset which is sorted on a particular field. Now, say you add some records to the set. These new records 'appear' at the end of the recordset and not necessarily in their properly sorted position in the recordset. Just call Requery() and all of the records will be re-sorted. I hope this makes sense. Steve

G'day Nick, > I have to agree - this Queensland "winter" is great Yeah, Brissy winters are *real* hard to take, aren't they? Whereabouts in Brisvegas are you? - We're at The Gap. Steve

G'day Brendan, How about a programming job where you can work from home? It's rather nice in here Brissy, sitting on the back patio, sipping a latte, browsing CP, and making a token attempting at doing some work. :-) It ain't exactly field work, but beats the hell out of the office commute routine. Steve

G'day, I'm wrestling with a largish dilemma at the moment and, as I’m the sole developer here, I can’t gather the programming team around and ask their opinions, so I thought I’d pick a few CPer’s brains, if I may. Come January next year, I start work on a range of new products [1] for our company, and I'm wondering whether to write them in C++ or C#. I’m basically betting the company on these new applications and I’m going to have to live with these products for 4 to 5 years, so I’m thinking conservatively at this stage and leaning towards C++, but I can’t help wondering if I might regret such a decision in a couple of years time. I have oodles of experience with C++/MFC but I’ve only played around the edges of C# to date. I don’t have enough experience with C# to make an informed decision on what language to use yet, but I figure I’ve got a few months to get the hang of C# and then make a final decision. I officially start on my C# edjumacation this week (I’ve read Eric’s book and I’m waiting for Tom’s to arrive), but in the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing what you folk think. Any thoughts that might help me make up my mind? Steve [1] Food Service applications for Windows. Lots of database access and I’ll need a good grid control and database reporting engine (Crystal?).

G'day, How about implementing a vertical splitter window and putting a tree control view in one pane and a list control view in the other? Then handle item selections in the tree and notifying the list view so that it's contents are synchronized with the tree. There may be a better way of handling this, but that's the best I can come up with for the moment. Hope this helps, Steve

Recent threads on hard to maintain code got me thinking: Have any of you looked at code that you wrote in the past and wondered "What the hell was I thinking when I wrote that?" I'm in the middle of updating one of our apps and decided to see if I could improve the speed of one particular area of the program. The original code was written about five years ago and it's always worked reliably, just way too slow. I have no idea of what I must have been smoking at the time, but the code is a joke. After a 20 minute re-write it runs about 10 times faster with a lot less code to boot! I was 35 at the time, so I can't even blame it on being young and stupid. :-) So, am I alone, or does anybody else here find bits of dodgy old code and wonder what evil spirits posessed you when you wrote it? Steve

Yeah, I don't have any kids myself, but manage to spoil all my nephews & nieces rotten. I do get the odd phone call from my brother & sisters wanting 'a word' about my influence on their kids, but hey, where's the fun if you can't make your sibling's lives even a little miserable? :-) Steve

> http://www.tradingpost.com.au? :) OK, I suppose I'll have to say it. "Tell 'im he's dreamin" :-)

I'd certainly make my way to Sydney or Melbourne from Brisvegas if there's ever a CP gathering. Mind you, I reckon the either Gold or Sunshine coasts would make a terrific CP venue. :-) Steve

G'day David, Gee, and here's me thinking I'm overly ambitious hoping to afford a Lancair 4 one of these days... :-) Seriously though, have you tried contacting Boeing? I expect they keep pretty good track of where their products go in order to send out SBs, ADs, etc. Steve

We had 4 8088 machines with 640kB or RAM. All of them were sharing a 40MB HD which was partitioned into 4 separate 10MB logical drives. If any two computers accessed the same logical drive at the same time it would trash the drive and we've need to re-format it and re-install all the apps & data. :-( Steve

Ta. I've heard that life begins at 40, but there's been no noticable difference so far. :-)

40 a couple of weeks ago! :eek: Steve