But when we wake, it's all been erased

The Beatles said "It's getting better all the time"... but doesn't that violate the second law of thermodynamics?

Within the past few weeks, Google Maps Street View has come to my neighborhood. Until recently, the closest city it had images for was Miami. Now the Google Maps truck has not only circled my neighborhood but has also covered every major road and street from Hobe Sound to Key West. It even bothered to go to the remote and virtually uninhabited Mainland Monroe. While we're at it, here's a Fun Fact for Street View: You can hold the left or right arrow key to turn your field of view, and you can hold the up or down key to go forward or backward quickly.

A few years ago, I became interested in lucid dreaming, which is when you dream while realizing that you're dreaming. It's possible to induce lucidity by performing "reality checks" throughout the day, which you'll then carry into your dreams by habit. But even if you do that, it's still difficult to have lucid dreams. After a few months, I had only several moments of lucidity. In both, I became conscious of my body lying in bed.

On Saturday night, I had a dream. I was in a small, empty room that had a door that was open to a field. Adam, my roommate from last year, had just moved his bed and other belongings out of the room, and our suitemate Cameron was outside the room as well. I looked at a clock, and I noticed that whenever I looked at it, it read a different time: a common reality check. Now that I knew that I was dreaming, I thought I'd try to call one of the girls I tried to get a date with but couldn't, just to see what could happen. I took out my cell phone and was deciding between #5 and #6, but I heard clocks ticking and people talking around me. It was my family members who had woken up before me. I figured that if I could hear them, I couldn't be asleep and dreaming; I must be awake and having an overactive imagination. I decided that if I couldn't get this scenario going in a dream, then I might as well just wake up. So I did.

Of course, I was asleep, and I was dreaming... right? It's not very clear. It seems to me that lucid dreaming + being able to hear the sounds around you = being awake and having a wild imagination. On the other hand, although I've never gotten very far in a lucid dream, I know from people's accounts that like real life, you can't control everything that goes on, only what you do. Contrast this with using your conscious imagination, in which you can picture anything beyond your wildest... oh, never mind.

But this incident has inspired me to start writing down my dreams again because I have the time to do it right after I wake up. I've found my dream journal, so I'm good to go. As I flip through the pages, I notice how difficult it is to gleam any useful information from it. My handwriting in it is terrible, as you might expect from someone writing immediately upon waking up. But we need to digitize this baby. I wonder if anyone knows of a program that would be good for cataloging dreams. I'd want to be able to sort them by date and tag them by themes, characters, techniques, and so on. I should be able to browse by tags and search the text of entries. The software must be free and should be in Ubuntu's repositories. I am thinking that OpenOffice.org Base might do the trick. I already have it, but I've never used it.

Of course, the first thing I thought after waking up from the dream was that I couldn't even get a date in my dreams.

BitTorrent is a popular protocol for sharing files on the Internet. Sometimes that sharing is unauthorized, so it has frustratingly been banned at various companies and universities. If you have a BitTorrent client, you can use LegalTorrents to find movies, music, books, and more that you're allowed to share.

Do you find yourself surrounded by dubious statements? Take a cue from Wikipedia and stick [citation needed] stickers next to statements that could use some more explaining.

Everybody has a digital camera these days, and it seems like they don't last very long before becoming obsolete. We're used to thinking that more megapixels equals a better quality image, but read why The Megapixel Myth isn't true.