Actually, I did the bulk of the work. I had to hire out
programmers to do bits and pieces that used VB that was above my own skill
level. The first one to do work was the one who suggested I put all my
stuff in a database to begin with. His comment, upon seeing the paperwork
system I had, was that it was the "most organized" system he had ever
seen. For a guy like me whose typical organizational system consists
largely of piles and knowing which square meter of the floor something
might be on, I suppose that says something.

Then he quit his job as a programmer, languished in unemployment
for a while, and eventually ended up in the Border Patrol.

The second guy was an idiot on the East Coast.

The third fellow I found through Guru.com (or whatever it was
named before that), and I wanted a local fellow since I figured out I
couldn't very well throttle the second guy since he was in New York. The
third guy was pretty good, but he apparently got depressed about his day
job, and ended up working at a new place. Between depression and the new
workload at the new job, he kind of fell out of touch, and that was that.

The fourth fellow was another local guy; he was particularly
sharp, and did some serious work. Those of you who appreciate the new seed
ordering system can thank him for putting it together. He kind of fell out
of touch, too. He does some coding to support a trumpet habit. I think he
now does work for a major pet chain.

The most recent guy I only have doing very tiny snippets on a
per-task basis. One job at a time. He's proven to have remarkable skill,
and gotten some bits accomplished that the other guys couldn't touch. Not
quite walking on water, but close.

There were 2-3 other people in there, but none did serious work
for me. This is all over the span of about 3-1/2 years, with the first
"real" bit of work coming in at 2 years ago in December. That relieved me
of the paperwork burden of the seed list, which was wonderful. I figure
I'm at somewhere around 95% complete right now; there's still some work to
do, but until it becomes enough of a nuisance, I'm not shelling out the
big bucks to fix it.

As for moving to something else- when I got started, Access was
pretty much the gold standard for anything you wanted to run on a personal
computer to handle up to, oh, 100 megs of data, and maybe more if you were
really determined. Now, of course, I'd probably go with MySQL or something
more popular. Transferring the data over is trivial; however, re-creating
the front end would take weeks or months of my time, and more money down
the rabbit hole. The big bit would be the data entry forms, which are
remarkably sophisticated. One of the programmers re-invented the form, I
think, in doing so. But it does exactly what I asked him to do, and that's
what counts.

As it stands, many of the features I have allow me to create
wonderful lists of what I have available- and I still don't have time to
create them or dump them to the web!

The address in the header doesn't work. That's why I don't reply
to your emails.

Cheers,

-AJHicks
Chandler, AZ