I Had A Dream — Or Was It?

Honestly… I don’t know what it was. It started out as a dream, but my wife thinks it might have turned into something else.

I suppose before delving into the details, I ought to point out that your lovable Vitki is fairly adept at deciphering those dreams worth bothering about. I’ve learned my patterns. Dreams that fade almost before I’m fully awake are really not worth bothering about. They fall into the “hard disk defragmentation” category. Lucid dreams, however… Well, those fall into Young’s “one dream” arena.

That in mind I won’t bore you with all the nonsensical “noise” of this dream. Only the pertinent details:

The scene is my own property, which is next to my parents property. (I live on a homestead.) It’s night time. In the midst of trying to fix one classic pickup with the parts of another — one in my drive way and the other in my parents driveway — I look up into the sky to see a low flying commercial plane. No… It’s not a plane. The configuration is wrong. It’s a space ship — a UFO! And it’s headed toward a cloud that’s glowing in the night sky.

It flies under the cloud, turns its nose upward into the cloud and, as it enters the cloud, it disappears.

Then it seems there are all kinds of lights in the sky. Planes near and far. Stars. Glowing clouds a long ways away.

Another UFO flies by even closer. It’s of a different configuration than the first. It too noses up as it gets below the cloud, then disappears as it enters it.

I turn to walk down the hill from my parents drive to my own. But as I get close to my drive a glowing cloud appears below my driveway and almost faster than I can even recognize it for what it is, it sucks me into it.

I remember two things: First, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave my wife and my family and my dogs. Second, I physically feel it as I “hit” the cloud. It does no physical damage. It doesn’t even hurt. But the feeling of “hitting” something is perceptible.

Then everything disappears. I mean: NOTHINGNESS! I would call it dark, except there is no dark . I can’t call it light because there is no light. There is only… Nothing! No sound, no feeling, no body, no world, no direction… Nothing. As strongly as I desired to stay in “the physical world” the feeling vanishes into the nothingness of this non-place. No regret. No remorse. And no desire to return, either. And for a fleeting second I remember thinking “what do I do now?”

Almost as if the thought evoked it, another light appeared. This one made of white, irregular tiles of light. Some tiles seemed to overlap others, leaving gaps. But there was no discernible pattern. This time, rather than me moving toward the light, the light came to me and simply went through me.

The first sensation, as the light took me to another place, was sound. Just noise; incomprehensible; as though I lacked the equipment to decode it. But then a pattern appeared, as though through a fog. Truck tires. An engine brake. A truck was going down the hill on the highway about two-hundred yards from the house. Then I felt the bed. And then the world returned — but it wasn’t the dream world. I was awake, in my bed, my wife asleep beside me, the dogs asleep on the floor beside the bed. It was dark, early morning. The sound of the truck tires and its engine brake retreated as it went down the hill.

From dream to full wakefulness, as though I had started in a dream, died, and been reborn, awake in my own bed.

But is that reasonable?

Having been at this game for awhile I can usually decode one of my lucid dreams in less than an hour. But this… Was it even a dream?

I have no idea. I’ve never experienced this before.Technorati Tags: dreams, lucid dreams, NDE

Mobilizing Business

Well, the first of last month I took the plunge — again. I bought a Treo 680.

Back in the early 90s I bought a Palm III, which I used for nearly 10 years before dropping it one too many times. Then it was back to ye-ol’ Day Runner for a few years. The one thing I never did like about my Palm was that I felt like I was in a little box. You either did things Palm’s way or you didn’t do them at all. So it was almost a relief to go back to my Day Runner.

But… Well, the ever increasing paperwork demands of our bureaucratic laden, regulatory rich modern world were eating up ever larger chunks of my time, to the point that every hour I spent making money “in the field” required at a half an hour of paperwork to account for it all. (Some economists have estimated that as much as 50% of the price you pay for any good or service has nothing to do with cost of production or transportation or even labor — it simply covers the cost of complying with government regulations.)

Anyway, there were two possible answers, of course: Hire office staff, or automate. Both have a front loaded time investment built in, and both require at least some continued input of cash, but by in large, computerized automation is el mucho cheaper. So, I bought the Treo. And after a month of adjustment, I’m glad I did.

One of the little tricks that I learned some twenty years ago with my Day Runner was the advantage of using a coded, centralized starting place for all information. It was Day Runner that invented the idea way back in the mid 80’s. They called their sheets that accompanied the method “Mem-mory” sheets. For my work I used a simple coding system of year, month, and then the count for that month for work related input. So for this month (May of 2008), my sequence would be 805XX, where XX would start at one and go up from there.

It’s a great way to keep track of how many calls I get each month. The side benefit is, I can look back and see how effective ad campaigns are, how changes in the economy affect things, and how business ebbs and flows at different times of the year.

In fact, it works so great that one of the things I always hated about my Palm III was that it didn’t have the ability to track information that way. It had the three main components of the Day Runner, but there was no way to integrate them. Even back in the 90s that was a major complaint about the Palm PDA. But back then there wasn’t enough computing power on board to support a complete, integrated PIM.

Today there is. Enter Agendus. Iambic software’s offering for people who want their PDA PIM to work like their Day Runner did. Not only does it allow me to input new calls as tasks, and to assign them my familiar coding sequence, it also allows me to input the customer’s information right into the PDA’s address book so that I have that information to generate work order headers in the Treo (another piece of software I found), and later for future direct mail marketing. Then, as I schedule the work, the task can be moved, intact to the calendar. Even more cool, since Agendus. makes use of the built in memo, to-do, and calendar, it doesn’t “break” anything when it comes to hot syncing. The information is still there in the desktop calendar — albeit sans all the cool Agendus bells and whistles.

As some of you may recall (from my Agony Accounting posts), I’m a Linux user. And after months of trying to find a way to handle the bookkeeping end of things more efficiently, I ended up right where I began, with GnuCash. A very imperfect (but improving) attempt by the Linux community to create an GNU version of Quicken.

Like Quicken, GnuCash imports both QIF and OFX files. (Quicken calls there OFX files QFX in an attempt to get their users to believe its a proprietary format, but it’s not.) So, in order to reduce the amount of time spent doing simple bookkeeping chores at night (and on weekends), I needed a way to input data in the field, and then to dump it into GnuCash at night. A way that also allowed me to track funds.

For that I eventually found Handmark’s PocketMoney. I must confess it’s not the coolest piece of software I’ve ever used. But it works. It’s actually a suite of programs: PocketMoney itself, which is like a miniature version of GnuCash; a vehicle manager program called MPG, which not only allows you to track your business mileage, fuel usage, and maintenance information, but with a simple tap on an icon, it will transfer the costs directly into PocketMoney’s FPS protocol; and then there’s a little program called CheckPlease which computes the tip for a meal and again, it shows of the “FPS” hooks built into PocketMoney by transfer the total price of the purchase into PocketMoney.

The thing about PocketMoney is that, unlike its competitors, it offers no means to get the data out of the program. It’s apparently designed to be a stand alone portable bookkeeping system. (Seems kinda useless to me, but… ) But back in 2000, when PocketMoney was first released, Gareth Watts solved that problem by writing a perl script that extracts the information from PocketMoney’s data file (which, when the PDA is backed up is then sitting on the desktop) and outputs it in QIF format, ready to be imported into GnuCash.

The program is called pm2qif.pl. I’ll not provide a link here because a simple search will provide dozens of places to download the script. Unfortunately my copy was broken. But I know just enough about programing that I was be able to fix it in less than an hour.

Last weekend I dumped a weeks worth of bookkeeping data onto the desktop in about five minutes.

All in all I think going mobile again has been a good choice. It has certainly freed up my time that the ever growing bureaucracy had managed to chew. Yeah, it raises the cost of doing business, but until the majority of citizens figure out that there really is a relationship between the cost of goods at the store and the amount of regulation they demand on the provision of those goods (or services) I have no choice but to do what every other business does: Raise my prices to cover the cost and keep on truckin’!

Technorati Tags: Treo 680, Agendus, PocketMoney, accounting