post to Twitter and Flickr at 8:36pm every day for a while

I was about to give up on this because I figured the posting process had to be a lot more complex (to hear Laurel Fan tell it, anyway). As it turned out, posting is ridiculously easy, however, the 8:36 pm post I sent to twitter didn’t go through. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.

For those interested, I was watching the second half of “Dr. Zhivago,” and I still think whoever came up with Communism was a dumbass.

I signed up with twitter (very important step), but now I’ m confused as to how I’m supposed to post stuff.

Okay, I just checked the website and found my answer in the FAQ (duh). Apparently when I sent the test message to 40404 it set the whole thing up. Seems too easy. Guess we’ll find out tonight!

and yet, such an innocuous goal sounds like a lot of fun. How about this: I will post to twitter at or around 8:36 p.m. every day for two weeks starting Friday, 9/19 and ending 10/3…is it that late in the year already? Sheesh!

My cameraphone pictures are at 128×128 (2¹⁴ pixels). So if I do this for approximately a year (on the order of 2^{8^ days), I will end up with 2}22^ pixels (which is about 4 million), which is enough pixels for an precise but not accurate (or is that accurate but not precise?) 11×14 print.

It’s hard to tell when sunset begins and ends (there are actually several official scientific definitions based on the angles between the sun, horizon, and observer), but at some time it is unquestionably day and some time later it is unquestionably night. And some time ago it was definitely daytime at 8:36 and now it is definitely dark.

(According to http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=234&month=8&year=2008&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1 the 8:36 fall equinox was August 6 and the 8:36 spring equinox will be May 11 2009)

This is more fun now that sending pictures from my phone magically started working again 2 weeks ago.

Here they are on flickr and on twitter (they should be the same thing: I have twitterfeed feeding the flickr feed to twitter)

Twitter

I’ve had a account for about 5 or 6 months and soon after signing up, mostly forgot about it.

I kept asking people, “Have you ever used Twitter?”.

All with the same response, I’ve never heard of it.

Perhaps I need to start running in a different social circle. Wait, perhaps I just need a social circle? Anywho…

Just the other day I saw a
video with Jack Dorsey,CEO of Twitter. explaining what Twitter is and the various ways it can be used. I thought enough of said video to add it to my blog nobody reads.

All of which got me to thinking about folks here on 43things and who might be using this nifty little tool.

Using the handy/dandy search engine I found a entry by the infamous
Buster McLeod who claims to have gotten the idea of posting every day at 8:36pm from
Chadwick. Not being a particularly proud individual I shamelessly jumped on the bandwagon.

Is this post wearing you down yet? I ask because its wearing my narrow white Irish arse out writing the damn thing!

Anyway, thought I’d give this a try for a while. If in fact you have read this far and are still awake you can follow me here.

Whew! I’m going to go lay down for a bit. This wiped me out.

I think once the new iPhone comes out next week and it automatically geo-tags photos, that I’m going to switch this project to a purely photographic one where the subject line is the caption, a photo is taken, and a location is gleaned from the submission as well.

Kellianne’s gonna start doing this with me and I think it’ll be a really cool lifetime project that documents our life together, while also including everyone else that participates in the project.

A large part of the inspiration for this project comes from this website, which is still being developed and which documents Polaroids taken every day by Jamie Livingston between March 1979 and October 1997 when he died in a hospital with health complications.

My contributions so far can be found on Twitter and Flickr.

Why 8:36pm? Precisely because of it’s lack of significance. Also, because evening time is when you’ll likely be doing things that you actually want to be doing (not “debugging IE6 again at work”). The 8:36pm slice has the potential to be completely mundane or very interesting—just like real life.

I got this idea from Chadwick, who started twittering at 8:36pm every day. I set a little alarm on my iPhone and post whatever I’m doing at that time.

Then I ran across Jamie Livingston who took a polaroid every day for almost 20 years (1979-1997), until he died on his 41st birthday. It’s a beautiful project. And so I’m adding the additional twist of taking a picture at 8:36pm every day too and posting it to Flickr.

This will be an easy way to create an impartial sample of my life, with a constraint that allows me to not have to think too much about when or where or what I’ll be sampling.

I think it would be more interesting and fun if others joined in. Come on!