Waiting

As of yet, I haven't heard back from Bill yet... he's probably still in shock. I guess I'll need to call him and see if we can either cut some stuff out or perhaps work on a payment plan (although that's not working well with the 3 year late Captain Keyboard account) .

Water Store v3.0 Flat Bid

Today I had to spend a few more hours coming up with a bid of how long it will take to create Water Store v3.0(Bill likes flat bids). Initially, before I put together the design doc, I guessed that it would take between 50 - 100 hours of work. Bill said how about a compromise of 75 hours but I laughed and said the numbers were a total guess and that I needed to put together a design doc first. After I came up with an estimate I now understand the need for design documents. I first came up with an estimate of 187 hours of work (and that was without any padding). I decided to shave off 25 hours which I really don't think is a good idea but I would really like to get this job. So I emailed Bill the bid of 162 hours and see if he still wants to do it or not.

The reason it will take so much time is because the current version is written in Visual Basic v3.0 which is over 10 years old and in order to move it into the future it will need to be written in the .Net language called C#. This is required in order to link up all his stores to a centralized database. He would also like to be able to sell the software to other water stores.

Epson Receipt Printer Woes

Bill had me come over to quickly install his Epson Receipt Printer. I could only stop by for 30 minutes because I was going to take Dave out for his birthday. Well, two hours later the printer still wasn't installed! So frustrating! Bill needs the printer for his show next week so I decided to take the computer home and reinstall the OS. After I formatted the hard drive, installed the OS and configured all his hardware the receipt printer installed on the first try so I was very happy!

I also had to call up tech support for a new CD Duplicator he bought to get it to work. I then copied 24 CDs for him and labeled them.

I spent over 4 hours of work doing all this but I didn't feel comfortable billing for all my time because the would just be a lot of money so I only billed for 2 hours.

http://www.jonathanpaulson.com/water/EpsonPrinterDriver.exe

Water Store v3.0 Design Spec

I spent a bunch of hours putting together a design document to give to Bill. I first made a document of just the current screens in Water Store v2.0 and met with Bill for a couple hours so he could tell me what each screen did so that I could understand how he uses the product.
I then took the screen shots and my notes and made a new twenty page design document. In this document I described what each screen does in the current version and documented any changes that would be required in the new version. I also described the new screens and new behind the scene functionality. This whole process took somewhere between 8-12 hours. This is time that I won’t be billing for but is important to do in order to make a quality product and be able to come up with a fair flat bid for Bill.