Time Tunneling

I love tunnels.  I can’t explain it, but when I am driving–or, in some cases, walk–though a hole bored through a mountain, I think of the engineering experience behind what is around me, and I’m in awe, Oprah be dammed.  So if I can go through a tunnel, I’m very happy.

This should also give you an idea of how easily amuses I am, but I digress . . .

So more playing last night.  I get a new piece of software and I’m like a cat with a new toy:  I find it incredibly interesting up until the point where my indifference kicks in and I look at it like it’s just something that I used to know.  Until then I ride that horse straight into hell.

Tunnels . . . Aeon Timeline allows you to attach files to an existing even, so if you of Tunnel01are a mind, you can take said information and leave it there so if you’re looking for that extra bit of info, all you gotta do is click and ye shall be rewarded.

Where am I going with this, you ask?  Well, simple:  I want to bury a timeline inside a timeline.  See that “The Big Time”?  Besides being the title of a Hugo Award winning novel, it’s an event that has a lot of different things going on.  How many?  Well, let me click on it and . . .

There you are.  All the detail of Tunnel02that one day–with a little overlap into the next–is there for me to see.  There’s likely a bit too much detail there for most people, but then I’m like that.  I’ve already figured out what’s happening and to whom, and most of the information I’ve put here has come from my Scrivener layout, because, as I’ve pointed out, you can timeline there as well.

But putting out that information in this format allowed me to see where some things were expandable, and there’s something else . . . though I’d thought about it before, I didn’t give it much thought, but I’m doing this event in November, and people are out about the grounds looking for things–and I do mean things–and the thought hit me, “Hey, is it getting dark, or what?”

So I run over to Sky View.

Sky View Cafe is a great place.  It’s on the Internet, so nothing to download.  It is Java based, so you can run it from just about any computer.  And it’s like a time machine, because you can select places and dates all around the world and see how the sky looked at that exact moment.

So I want to so what the sky was like near Rockport, MA SkyView01(which is very close to the school; I could have used Gloucester as well) on 8 November, 2011, at 16:01, which is 4:01 PM for a lot of you.  I plug in my numbers, and I get . . .

I can see the sky, and I know that the sun is dipping below the horizon.  I even know from checking the Sky View calendar that sunset for that day and location was at 16:27, so in about a third of an hour it’s gonna be twilight.  And with this new information I can go into the Inspector, link to the picture, and–hey, there it is:  a little icon of the picture is now set up inside the event, telling me that I Tunnel03have something more that I can click and see if I like.  I can also, if I’m of a mind, take this same information over the Scrivener so I can see it as well . . .

I don’t do this sort of set up just for NaNo:  I do this for just about every story I write.  Only few of them are this big in terms of what I’m trying to cover.  It’s not so much what’s happening, as it is everything in the world that I’m looking at, and that’s a lot.  Sure, looking up when the sun set a few years back sounds like overkill, but then, for the next few scenes, it means that what occurs does so in deepening gloom, leading up to a scene that takes place in almost complete darkness–

In a tunnel.

Told you I like them.