tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2981939676968481781.post902769501681919056..comments2023-10-30T04:54:14.546-04:00Comments on Diana Kimball: SMS and the Magic NumbersUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2981939676968481781.post-80693207533007198362008-08-05T02:26:00.000-04:002008-08-05T02:26:00.000-04:00Joshus: this is amazing! If only I knew how to pr...Joshus: this is amazing! If only I knew how to program. My friend Tim and I are doing a presentation this fall on the vagaries of personal archives. I've started naming files in such a way that someday, in the future, I'll be able to make sense out of all of them. (As a timeline; a record of life.) Thanks for the story, (the true story), and stay in touch.Diana Kimballhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17754911751733790690noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2981939676968481781.post-5341184653670480352008-08-03T16:42:00.000-04:002008-08-03T16:42:00.000-04:00Mid-March of this year, I started doing something ...Mid-March of this year, I started doing something similar.<BR/><BR/>I abhor cell phone text messages (the economics of them are ridiculous), but hypocritically treasure IM. So much so that I collected thousands of IM conversations via the logging features in my IM clients since June 2003.<BR/><BR/>"Why do you do that?" my friends would ask, worried that I would capture something incriminating. I honestly didn't have a good answer, other than maybe that folks would tell me phone numbers and other important information via IM, and I would immediately forget it.<BR/><BR/>Come March 2008, surviving my college correspondence and numerous hard drive failures and migrations, I had what could be called a "corpus of IM." Disorganized in numerous text files, folders, and whatever other archival artifacts my IM clients gave me, the collection was interesting to peruse on nostalgic nights.<BR/><BR/>Unfortunately, I am a programmer. I felt my system was inefficient. I wrote a program that would go through my IM logs, read in all pertinent data (conversation start/stop, timestamps, nicknames, IM protocols, maybe the message itself) and commit it to a database. I even put a web interface in front of it (though visible to nobody but myself).<BR/><BR/>I was reminded immediately of my IM logging side-project when I stumbled upon your writings a few days ago. I even decided to add a new feature. It is now a wholly frightening and exhilarating thing to hit "Random" and be taken to any time in the last five or so years.<BR/><BR/>Thanks for the reminder, and for the good reads in general.Joshhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14082383042591687127noreply@blogger.com