Hey Mikey... (the accountant). How we doin'? Almost breaking even? All the rental profits went to pay off those publishers and other folks who gave me 'fall dating'. I bought stuff on credit. Ouch. Wrong. Can't do that. But now to cover that mistake and move on. A few mistakes from three or four months back are coming home to roost. There's only one way out. I need to sell a really nice guitar and a tenor sax this month. I need to be especially wary of purchases. Makes no sense to restock a lot of the band stuff I'm out of because the demand will be next to zero a week from now. I need to use whatever I've got to make ready for the next big thing. That would be Christmas. The new Yellow Pages hit in a few weeks or less. The rentals are paid three months in advance. So the next time that I see cash from them is in December. So now everything will likely go into hibernation for a couple of months whilst I try to locate instrument coffee mugs and other under $20 gift items with a musical theme. Then I'm hoping I'll need a seat belt for the ride ahead.

Just found two more brand new good trumpets that got overlooked as they were piled with the cheap Chinese ones. Cool. I've still got stuff.

Now I face a technical dilemna. The rental accounts are all paper based. This is good. But I've got a lot of accounts to process - and even more going forward. I have to automate it. No problem, could probably do that in a couple of weeks. But therein lies the rub. I would then be dependant on the software I used to manage accounts. And I need to have a computer terminal at the register and fail-safe. Ouch. It's that fail-safe part. Not just safe from accidental loss, but also from technical obsolescence. I've done all this before, but it's a lifestyle, not just a database. Religious daily backups and transaction logs. Backup media in two locations. Going back to the beginning. No commercial software. Write your own in K&R C and stdio. You'll have to modify it every few years to migrate your media onto the latest and greatest thing. Oh, and not just two locations, but you have to have two backups for every interval of interest. Whoa. It's a trap no matter what way you go. Paper records aren't looking so bad now, but it's sure a lot of scribbling one day each month.