Mount Madonna School, November 2000
A gift of a framed image of Ganesh - ‟The elephant headed god, the remover of obstacles, the protector. With his blessings, a person gains confidence in the success of their endeavor and his guarding hand keeps negativity and ignorance at bay.”
In addition to the thank you cards and gifts there was a continual expression of gratitude for the work I did. This is, of course, a wonderfully effective way to motivate volunteers. Here is a mail thread which is a good example of the feedback I got through the years.
In November 2024 there was a notice of the transition from Reg to RG in the Mount Madonna Messenger.
The complete code for Reg is kept in a public open source repository at github.com with a total of 2,137 commits (since December 9, 2018 - when we moved from CVS to git). Just for fun, here are some selected code fragments with the coolest parts colored in red.
I lived at MMC from 1996-1997. In 1998, after I moved back into town and took another corporate job, I asked to be paid $50 per hour. At this time the going rate for software development was $85 per hour. The $50 per hour amount was never increased. The tasks I took on and the features that were added were based exclusively on requests and feedback from the director or the office staff. Here are two tallies from the accounting office: MMC and MMI. Mount Madonna Institute shared the cost of development when the features were mostly for MMI.
1998 198.72
1999 970.79
2000 35.00
2003 262.50
2004 480.00
2005 3283.33
2006 520.83
2007 7983.34
2008 25645.71
2009 47724.88
2010 21729.17
2011 3261.33
2012 9475.00
2013 8295.84
2014 4837.50
2015 7069.45
2016 2895.83
2017 8815.00
2018 16387.50
2019 6194.25
2020 7135.91
---------
183201.88
A total of $183,201.88 from 1981 to 2024. The rewrite began in 2007 and took about two years. I did not have another job in this period. It was important to have my ‟sustained attention” so that the project could be completed (including migration of data) and ‟go live”. Unless that happened all the work would have been for naught. To ensure completion of the job, 50% of the money was withheld until the project went live - in April 2009. This is why the amounts in 2009 were so much larger. In the end, I remember Brajesh saying that it was completed on time and under budget which never happens!
I kept a time log and submitted periodic invoices. Here is the timelog from 2007 to 2009. I noted the hours and what I did in that time.
$183,201.88 is a LOT. In “Reg by the Numbers” above I note that from 1989 through 2024, Reg recorded $42,798,937 in payments to MMC. That’s also a LOT! Note that 183/42798 = 0.4%. Another thing to note is this tally of my earnings from my Social Security account.
After Babaji suffered a stroke in 2013 I donated a total of $25,700 from the money I received from MMC to help with his 24/7 care.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, MMC had to shut down in July 2020 and had no income at all. I stopped charging for my work - up to the completion of the transition to RG in November 2024.
Daily Sutra from Babaji
Talks with Babaji