Several years ago, the Occupational Psychologist and I developed a program in which the user would be presented with a variety of occupations (over 100) and would choose which appeal and which don't. On the basis of the answers, we performed some psychological voodoo and then presented a list of occupations to which the user would be suited. We still use this program in our 'laboratory' setting.
We later thought that this program could be used as an alternative revenue stream: we would convert it from a native Windows program to an interactive Internet program, put it on the OP's site and then invite youngsters to 'take the exam', paying a small charge for the privilege. As this kind of programming is not in my CV, we turned it over to an external programmer, the OP's eldest son (this is not a case of nepotism: he works for Intel, in case anyone is doubting his competence). We arranged the online exam so that one would first have to pay via PayPal, then using the PayPal receipt number as a serial number, the youngster would 'take the exam'; the output file would be sent by email to a certain address. My part in this was to parse the letter that we received from PayPal, notifying us of the paid user, then download the email holding the output file, perform the voodoo then send the results back via email. A non-registered user could still take the exam but the results would not be returned.
[For any brave souls interested, here is the link to the exam. But beware: it's all in Hebrew]
Unfortunately this did not turn out to be the revenue stream that we had envisaged so the OP made the brave decision to turn the online exam into freeware (but still no one has heard of it...). I had to change my program slightly so that it would ignore anything which was connected with serial numbers etc. This modification was quite simple but then I came across something else which needed my attention.
The program sent its results by email: it was using code which used Outlook as the sending mechanism. Unfortunately, this required that Outlook run continuously on the 'server' which had caused problems in the past. Also, considering the programming work which I had been doing in the past two months, it was time to free the program from the shackles of the proprietary Outlook and move to the freeware of GMail.
Whilst it didn't take long to perform the conversion, the testing took hours and seemed inconsistent. Sometimes the program would send an email but more often that not, it would stall in the portion of the program which actually sends the email, with no clues being given as to the source of the problem. After knocking my head against a brick wall and coming exceeding close to giving up, the answer suddenly presented itself: when sending mail via GMail, there are two security DLLs which need to be present in the same directory as the program. As soon as I moved those DLLs into the correct directory, the program worked (it had worked before because sometimes I tested the program in a directory which contained those DLLs)!
This is what I have referred to before as the Gumption Trap; once again I fell into its jaws.
But what this really reminds me of is a thread in Nick Hornby's "Juliet, Naked", which I last read a few weeks ago. The book starts off with a couple, Annie and Duncan, making a pilgrimage to America in order to visit places which supposedly had a strong connection to Tucker Crowe, the fictional recluse musician who made the eponymous record. When they come back to their dreary British seaside town, Annie and Duncan separate; Annie makes a calculation that she wasted fifteen years with Duncan and that no one was going to give her those years back.
This is how I feel (on a slightly different level, of course): I wasted a few hours and no one is going to give me them back. I could have been doing something else more productive, like studying for my doctorate....
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