Day: June 13, 2005

Some friends and I are gathering at Children’s Hospital at 5:30 pm to donate blood.  I thought I’d invite local readers of this blog to show up as well.  The center tends to be less busy after 4 pm and you can walk in any time up until around 6:30 pm (they close at 7 and the process takes about 30 minutes).  You get free parking in the Children’s garage (across the street), a T-shirt, and name-brand snacks.  The technicians at Children’s are much more skilled than the Red Cross staff (i.e., you won’t have holes in your arms) and the environment is much more pleasant than a university blood drive.  Finally this saves Children’s Hospital from having to pay the Red Cross $200 for a pint of blood and cuts out a lot of middlemen.

[Remember that having lived for extended periods of time in England or other mad-cow areas is disqualifying as is having been to a malarial region in the last year (even places you might not think of as malarial, such as rural China).  Statistical risk factors for HIV infection are also disqualifying.  Call the number listed on http://www.childrenshospital.org/help/donate.html if you’re in doubt.]

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A business-minded friend of mine wanted a Web site with a lot of database-backed features, such as user registration, classified postings, auction bids, a user reputation system, etc.  A simplified eBay.  She also needed all the graphic design done.  She posted her specs on www.rentacoder.com and the numbers to implement this system came back at around $450 for the entire job, including the graphic design.  The five bids all came back fairly close to $450 from programmers in Bangalore, Romania, and Canada(!).  She put the project on hold for reasons unrelated to implementation so we don’t know how it would have worked out.

Has anyone used rentacoder?  I wonder if the undergrad CS majors one sees posting SQL puzzles and Lisp problems on USENET are going to start.  (Though if they spent enough time on rentacoder.com perhaps they would change their major eventually.)

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