Thursday, May 11, 2006

SpanofLife

I don't know if I will get around to working on this for a while, especially since it involves computer work. The idea is to provide a web-based "timeline" interface for interesting spans of time. This could be your life or other lives, or it could be spans of history. You would be able to see key events on each span laid out, along with images, etc. Bringing two or more spans together would let you compare your own life with, say, Alexander the Great's. Or see the timelines of the Founding Fathers all together, so you could see that in fact, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were of two different generations. Or overlay what's happened in the past 100 years with what happened in 1700-1800. Or layout your kids's pictures in a linear format.

The idea I want to get across is that everybody's span is pretty short, so you need to get the stuff done that you want to get done before the Reaper comes. But in a positive way. From a practical standpoint, there's a lot of work to be done. I think I realized this when I just laid out the years from 1974 to 2054 in Excel, and put my age next to each year, and filled in some things up to my current year. I saw that
a) my life is about 3/8 over
b) stuff takes time to accomplish, but not as much time as you think, if you ever get started
c) it was pretty neat to see that all laid out.

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