A History of Brief Time
September 15th, 2008 | by Mitchell Allen |
Photo by juria yoshikawa
“Why do people wish to go back in time to ‘fix’ their mistakes, when they can go forward and pretend it never happened?”
- Aaron Clanky, Inventor of the Shaken Gent Whip*
Time Waits For No Man, Woman or Child
Dishwater-gray, moth-eaten fabric must be between my ears. I am increasingly unable to recall technical information. Perhaps there are erudite psychological explanations or simple physiological reasons but, here’s my take:
We fail to attach technical memories as well as we do personal memories due to the absence of emotional glue.
They’re called dry facts for a reason!
Anyway, I’ve been working on a new WordPress blog and the first few posts have no images. I finally added a post with images and needed to change the way the uploader stores them. The default is to use date and year subfolders. The trouble began when I stared blankly at the WordPress dashboard, willing my noggin to regurgitate the sequence of navigational clicks.
Time passed. I had no idea. I tried Google. I couldn’t even frame the question properly! I went to bed.
Saturday. Freshly charged neurons. With Pop-tart ® and coffee at hand, I set out to Google this – in reverse:
use month and year to separate uploads in WordPress
Bingo! I randomly picked WordPressGarage.com after noticing a promising phrase.
It turns out that the solution was given in a comment by Ryan Hellyer, which I am going to quote here, so I can create some emotional glue:
(1) Go to your admin panel
(2) Choose “Options” in the main menu
(3) Choose “Miscellaneous” in the sub menu
(4) Enter your upload folder in “Store uploads in this folder:”
(5) Un-tick the “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders” box
Time Sink
It turns out that on my new blog, I don’t even have access to the Miscellaneous sub-menu.
I can’t use FTP, either. I guess I’m stuck with month and year folders.
So , the big question is, did I waste time? Not really. I discovered a neat technical blog, I did find the answer to my WordPress question and I gained something to write about.
Time is a Temple, Temple is a University
I subscribe to an email group hosted by a cool guy named Bill Cheswick. He started a thread to share his time travel story.
Peter Radatti, a member of the group, replied with an interesting theory, relative to time:
“ [I] do not believe that time is a vector but omnidirectional. The past changes all the time, we just don’t know it because the changes become part of our perception of the past. I also do not believe that time is consistent. How could we know … if we use time to measure time?”
The two of them have inspired a bit of creative silliness:
A History of Brief Time
“The ideas of time travel are so quaint. Look at this one! They’ve concocted some sort of transport that is powered with constituent 94.”
“Yes, son, but it was just a motion picture and the creators were not really scientists.”
“But why did they work so hard to be true-to-life in so many of their other motion pictures?”
“Because they had first-hand knowledge of those experiences, or they knew where to learn about it.”
“Wait a minute, Pop! How could the film producers possibly have known about the giant lizards and the global super chill?”
“Often, they made lucky guesses that turned out to be correct. Sometimes, one of us would go back and tell them.”
“Ooh … not good.”
“Mmm.”
“Did you ever want to go back?”
“I do go back. Often.”
“WHAT?”
Photo by juria yoshikawa
“The ideas of time travel are so quaint. Look at this one! They’ve concocted some sort of transport that is powered with constituent 94.”
“Yes, son, but it was just a motion picture and the creators were not really scientists.”
