diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index f02f5c7..f461ccd 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -2,3 +2,11 @@ jobmanager
 ==========
 
 easy distributed computing based on the python class SyncManager for remote communication and python module multiprocessing for local parallelism 
+
+### testing
+
+   virtualenv --system-site-packages ve_jm
+   source ve_jm/bin/activate
+   python setupy.py install
+   python examples/simple/simple_example.py
+   
diff --git a/jobmanager/__init__.py b/jobmanager/__init__.py
index 6090670..5a042a0 100644
--- a/jobmanager/__init__.py
+++ b/jobmanager/__init__.py
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env python
 # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
-__version__ = "0.1.0"
+from jm_version import __version__
 
 from .jobmanager import *
 
diff --git a/jobmanager/jm_version.py b/jobmanager/jm_version.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..236ee48
--- /dev/null
+++ b/jobmanager/jm_version.py
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+# put this into a separate file so we don't have a problem installing
+# with pip (unmet dependencies upon import).
+__version__ = "0.1.0"