Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Time

EarthLink? WTF? OMG!

DecemberBoy — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:34:50 -0800

So I recently moved, and as I always do, got an account with Time Warner (who are pretty much the only option in the part of Austin where I live). I noticed that my IP was resolving as either "earthlink.net" or "mindspring.com" when it should be "austin.rr.com", but didn't think much of it. However, today I found a letter in the mail containing "important information about your EarthLink account." Wot's, uh, the deal? I didn't sign a contract with EarthLink and wouldn't, due to their Scientology connections. This is on top of the fact that my down speed is about half what it was not 15 miles from here.

Can I save a timestamped version of a website to use in court?

Anonymous — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 06:43:49 -0800

Is there a way to capture a website at a certain point in time so that it's admissible in court? I may be about to be involved in litigation soon and there's information on a site which will be very important and I'd like to use it as evidence, but I'm worried it might move or change.

How many grains of sand until we're there...?

TigerMoth — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:30:27 -0800

Time&SpaceFilter: GoogleFu failing me here... Trying to RE-find specific time and amount measurement/approximation sites. 1. A site (perhaps found on the Blue, a few years back?) about time where one can enter, say, a birth date/time and determine number of days or hours or minutes or whatever someone's been alive AND the date/time on which the next major milestone (25,000 days, 500,000 hours, or whatever) occurs, other things too...

2. A different site which provides nice visual analogues for amounts. Something like 100 is roughly the number of seats in a section of a baseball stadium (?), that sort of thing.

These were both fairly unadorned sites, and probably not related (though they may have been).

Preparing to go through a wormhole over the holidays, so I was thinkin' these might be useful again... ;)

Is that red shift in your pocket...

sundri — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 13:24:40 -0800

Is that red shift in your pocket... O.k., this bugs me every time I see an article that states something along the lines of "hubble looks way back in time!" or " [we are] spotting galaxies that existed just 600 million years or so after the big bang"?

Since I am assuming we can not observe our own matter, what is it we are looking at?

I have been operating under the assumption that the matter we observe, who's light is reaching us 600 million years later, is matter that is more or less moving in a direction that is -- again more or less -- opposite of ours. A lot of time is spent talking about the when of it, but not the what.

Or did I miss something in cosmology for dummies....

WTF

Nattie — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:44:18 -0800

Creep me out! Lately I've been on an "unsettling stuff" kick -- I like feeling unsettled and I find it creatively inspiring -- but I'm running low on things to explore. It's hard to articulate precisely what I'm looking for, but it tends to be stuff that almost certainly isn't true but for the few minutes you think about it, it's really unnerving. The underlying theme in what unnerves me seems to be that reality appears to be one way, but in fact it's this other, more sinister way. Examples of stuff is conspiracy theories -- New World Order theories, CIA experiments in mind control and paranormal stuff --, weird religious or spiritual ideas about "evil" supernatural phenomena, some theories of time and space (which I am not so quick to put in the "almost certainly not true" category), etc. Oh, and then lately Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video and all those articles about the occult symbolism -- she has a lot of unsettling pictures where she doesn't seem human. Weird mysteries fit the bill, too, like the Taman Shud case. Other pseudo-scientific ideas, like the Parasite Eve idea that because mitochondria have different DNA they might actually "take over" a person completely, work too.

Also, this is even more subjective, but the more plausibly expressed the idea is without actually being realistic, the better; it has to lead me on a bit or else I never feel unnerved. So, for example, your standard Bilderberg Group conspiracy theory has some element of feasibility that David Icke's "oh btw they're all blood-drinking reptile ppl from another dimension lol" doesn't; the former is unsettling until you give it a few moments thought, the latter is just too ridiculous out of the gate. Anything that starts from some kind of evidence, even if misrepresented or misunderstood, seems to work, which is probably why pseudoscience is good for this sort of thing. Also, I've noticed that stuff that uses apparently made-up evidence works too, provided that the made-up evidence is of the kind that sounds possible and you'd have to actually look it up to know better; conspiracy theories tend to do this a lot, like they say that so-and-so noteworthy person said XYZ, or they make up noteworthy people altogether.

In other words, the sort of stuff that if you take what's presented on good faith instead of scepticism, the unsettling conclusions seem plausible.

I'm looking mostly for shorter things, like ideas, short stories, and maybe short films. I'm not entirely opposed to books and movies, but my inability to "believe" anything creepy for more than a few minutes greatly dilutes my enjoyment of longer things. Long stuff takes an investment of seriousness I just can't muster for anything like that. When it comes down to it, I don't believe in anything supernatural and I don't think any grand scale conspiracies are likely. "Never Let Me Go" by Kazuo Ishiguro, for example, didn't unsettle me as much as it would have done in a shorter format, although it was fairly unsettling. I'd be willing to try more things like that, even though it's less likely to be effective.

To be clear, fiction or nonfiction or fiction-masquerading-as-non-fiction are all cool.

Stuff I am *not* looking for:
- Certified real scenarios, at least for the most part, because those tend to be genuinely upsetting or just piss me off, and that's not the feeling I'm looking for with this question. However, if the certified real scenario *sounds* like something that's so bizarre as to be made up, it might qualify; so something like "however many people die because of Corporation X's negligence and that's unsettling" isn't what I'm looking for, but some real CIA experiments seem to fit anyway, like the mind control experiments are just weird to imagine. Things that allegedly happened but are under dispute work pretty well, too.

- Edging into "scary story" kind of stuff, gore doesn't unsettle me. When it comes to horror genre things, I need weird paranormal stuff going on to feel freaked out, not blood. I don't care if blood/violence is present as long as there's weird stuff going on, but it needs to be more inspired than something like the Jason movies. The Ring/Ringu is the best example I can come up with of something that was violent but that wasn't the main scary part; the scariness mostly came from how alien the girl was and how little was explained.

To put it another way, what's something you read/watched/heard about that gave you an eerie, upsetting feeling, even though you knew better? I realize none of my criteria are precise and I'll probably get a lot of answers that don't effect me much, but give it your best shot.

Intergalactic Google-fu Fail...

squasha — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:02:22 -0800

I've searched here, there, and everywhere for information on the optimal time/date for viewing this year's Leonid meteor shower from my little corner of central Japan. Has anyone else out there been able to find something with a world clock style of interface or am I reaching? I checked the IMO, but found their schedule unwieldy.... It's already frigid outside and I'm having a hard time convincing myself to just bundle up and go out there if there's a chance it will be better several hours from now, or worse, tomorrow night. It's nearly 9pm on Monday, November 16th, Tokyo time.

(Not that I'm there. If I were, light pollution would keep me from even bothering to ask. It's much darker here in rural Gifu.)

No time for each other

Anonymous — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:51:25 -0800

I'm in a relationship of a few months old with a wonderful girl. We have great times together, but there's the catch. We're hardly together. How can we change that, or work around it? We met when we were both doing part time work whilst looking for full time work. So we got to spend a lot of time together and it was awesome. Since then however, we've both found jobs that really don't mix time-wise. She works 4 days a week 9-5, but then almost every evening she does volunteer coaching at a local gym. She's done this for years and its her passion, so I won't ask her to give it up.
I now work a full week, including on her day off. Weekends are more sporadic; we both have commitments elsewhere but occasionally some free time will coincide.

Our work lives are pretty hectic, and we both get tired easily, so even though we live really quite close to each other, we're often too tired to do anything together, or if we are together, but tired, we're cranky and get on each other's nerves.

So, from seeing each other almost every couple of days for some quality time together, its gone down to an evening or two a fortnight. We still talk, text each other often, but I miss her when she's not around!

The crux is: We want to be able to see each other as much as is possible. But is this possible?
Is this normal? Do other couples have a similar situation, and what do they do to work around it?
What can we do in the short time we have available, apart from the obvious?
Is there anything we can do to make up free time?

And any other suggestions or advice would be much appreciated.

_{Throwaway email just in case it's needed: notimeforus@googlemail.com

And I'm a guy fwiw. Both mid 20s. UK.}

Part-Time Jobbery

Willie0248 — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:13:20 -0800

I'm changing jobs here in a few weeks, but the new one occasionally takes up much less of my time. Thus I need an extremely flexible second job to fill the time! What's out there? A little history: Until recently, I was working a single 8-5 full-time job (about 45 hours per week). Since then I managed to secure a more lucrative job that has extremely sporadic hours - it might require 80 hours one week, and 5 the next. I've been trying to do both, but the old job is finally getting booted.

So here's my question: In the weeks that I have very little work, what can I do to continue earning? I would need a source of income that I can pick up and put down as needed, since there's no telling when I might get slammed with a very busy workload. I know there are things out there like Mechanical Turk, but the pay is abysmal.

So how realistic am I being? Is there something out there with decent pay for the time invested that is also as flexible as I need?

How to save time now; how to save time all the time.

rahnefan — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:51:15 -0800

What are the best time-saving methods you have found? Need more time, as much as possible. Please don't suggest "sleep when you're thirty," I'm not in college. :) What ways have you found to maximize your free time in general?

What about for a definite period (say, two weeks)?

Practical methods and extreme measures will both be considered!

How long should I wait?

RawrGulMuffins — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 11:53:53 -0800

Question’s about my virgin girlfriend pertaining to sex and sexuality. History: I’ve been dating this girl for about 6-7 months now; it took about 3 months to win her over. I knew going into the relationship that she was a virgin so it wasn’t a surprise that we didn’t have sex right off the bat. What did surprise me is that until very recently she was uncomfortable just making out with me.

I am very much not a virgin (male if it matters). In fact I’d say that sex is about my favorite activity, and as such waiting this long has been a bit difficult. When I think about my ideal woman, the perfect person who has everything I desire, my Girl comes pretty damn close. Obviously there are little things that bother me, but I really want what we have going to work out. I would very much regret looking back five years from now and thinking that I fucked up because I couldn’t wait just a little bit longer.

Pertinent information: My girl admitted she had(s) low self-esteem about her body. It surprised the shit out of me because A) she’s truly, stupidly beautiful, B) it seems to be the only self-esteem issue she has. There has been no long term boyfriend’s before me, although she had a crush on a guy for 6 years through her school life.

There is no history of sexual abuse or mistreatment on either side. We’re both 21 years old. She rarely tries to masturbate, maybe once a month if that. She’s also never orgasmed but that doesn’t seem uncommon for females her age.

My Girl has said that she doesn’t think her libido is naturally non-existent, and there has been improvement on her side of the equation. It’s just taking a hell of a long time for things to get going.

She doesn't want to bring medical help into this situation yet, she doesn't enjoy accepting help on intensely personal things.

Questions: 1: If she doesn’t have a naturally non-existent sex drive, about how long do you think it would take for her to discover her sexuality? I know it’s impossible to give a time-table on this sort of things, but a general guess would help me immensely. Personal anecdotes very much welcome.

2: This is a deal breaker for me and at this point I’m attempting to stay in the relationship to see if things “improve.” Has anyone ever been in my position before, and if so how long did you wait until you were certain you weren’t making a mistake by leaving your SO?

3: I’m going sexually nuts, is there anything (other then masturbation, it’s getting old) a man can do to lower his sex drive, especially in the presence of my very attractive girlfriend?

How to fill time at work using the Internet?

st starseed — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 04:59:04 -0800

How to fill time at work using the Internet? My workload as of late has been lighter than normal, and I find myself having a few extended (30-minute) blocks of time with nothing to do.

To be clear, this is not the kind of workplace where I can be super-ambitious and go ask my bosses for more work; once my well is dry, it's dry.

My way to fill these empty blocks of time has been to visit the more popular news/essay sites, including slate, arts and letters daily, and the new york times. However, I feel like I'm consuming web candy for 30 minutes at a time...when I'd rather be eating a full meal. What are some more substantive ways I can utilize my time? How do you deal with this?

To be clear, the company watches every single thing we do online, so anything personal (like starting a blog) is out of the question.

Time travel to New Amsterdam - for kids!

suzeQ — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:12:07 -0800

Going bonkers trying to remember the title of a favorite children's book that I read growing up in the late 1960s. The story takes place in NYC and the main characters are 2 children, a boy and a girl. The children stand in the first car of a subway train and as the train moves faster and faster through a Bowery tunnel, the children travel back in time to NY when it was New Amsterdam. They meet Peter Stuyvesant and other characters in Manhattan when it was a Dutch colony. Sound familiar to anyone?

Turkish delight on a moonlit night ... or mid-afternoon, perhaps.

mykescipark — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:25:03 -0800

I recorded this from the Voice of Turkey via shortwave on 11955 kHz last Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't make note of the world time, and my meager online language resources don't seem to help me figure it out. What time is she announcing after the pips?

Presidential time-usage in pictures

paisley — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:28:02 -0800

Who spent more of their Presidency on vacation, Dubya or Bush, Sr.? Who travelled more, Clinton or Reagan? It seems to me, there's got to be some organization somewhere that tracks this kind of Presidential time-utilization info, and organizes it into pretty charts and graphs. Help me find the information visualization I seek!

Help me track where I spend my surfing time

Solomon — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 13:41:47 -0800

I'm looking for a Firefox extension (compatible with 3.5) that will show me how much time I spend on a given website per day/week. I do not want:

To block sites at a specific time/for a specific period.

A desktop application (I want the extension to run solely in Firefox, so I can use it in Firefox Portable).

The extension to report my surfing data back to a website. I strongly prefer the data cached locally, but I'm prepared to be flexible on this.

To have to start a timer counting manually when I visit a site. I want it to be completely transparent until I view the data.

I've looked at Pageaddict, which doesn't work on Firefox 3.5 and is apparently abandoned by it's owner, 8aweek, which is no longer supported, Leechblock, which doesn't offer the functionality I want, Timetracker, which shows only the time spent for the browser as a whole, not for specific sites & MeeTimer, which isn't updated for 3.5, and doesn't appear to offer fine-grained enough control over sites. Pageaddict and 8aweek appear closest in functionality to what I want.

I want to be able to see at a glance that I've spent 3h47m on Metafilter this week and visited 41 times. Is there an extension that will allow me to do this?

What's a stranded girl to do?

miss_scarlett — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 08:44:06 -0800

Albertan, in Ontario for a family get together in Durham- I long to visit friends for a day in Toronto - So far I have a way INTO To., early Wednesday morning...getting BACK to Durham is the problem. The other hitch is, I will be getting into To. at around 5am...what on earth can I do to pass the time between then and say...brunch with friends at a reasonable hour? So, my question is two fold:

a) Any suggestions on Transportation from toronto, ontario to Durham, Ontario on a Wednesday afternoon/evening

and

b) Any suggestions on way to pass the time on a Wednesday, in Toronto, from 5am until say...10am?

Thanks MeFites!

Too much time, too much to do.

SNWidget — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 08:54:40 -0800

TemporalFilterRedux: I've got about two weeks (starting today) before my graduate classes kick back up. I have a bunch of things I need to take care of between now and then, in no particular order. I've always had a problem with time management (as previous questions of mine demonstrate), so I'm looking for advice on how to deal with this two week block, and how to make sure that I get everything, and don't just sit around, watching TV. There are errands, things around the house, and prep for school that all needs to get done. Unfortunately, I work best on a schedule that is imposed by others - whenever I make my own deadlines, I feel no problem just breaking them.

I'm looking for general advice on how to parse up this amorphous blob of time and get my things done - if my track record is any indication, I'll come up with grand plans and lists, and then never quite figure out an order, so I'll sit around and play "Turtles in Time" on my SNES emulator.

Some example things I need to take care of: deposit checks, clean kitchen, pick up something at the mall (20 minutes away), book a hotel for next weekend, go up to campus (30 minutes away), spend a few hours there doing a menial task for my instrument (making reeds), call my bank, etc etc.

I have (most) of these things out of my head. I just can't organize them into a way I feel that is "most efficient," so I just don't do any of them. My brain works in very screwed up and mysterious ways sometimes.

I've been working on time management issues I posed in a previous question, but this is different for me - it's the combination of having a bunch of little (and some big) things to do, but without any sort of constraints on them.

Any advice on how to deal with this? The reason that this is pressing is not so much that everything I need to do in the next few weeks is mission critical, but that I'll be starting my masters thesis in the fall, and that is sort of the definition of a large project with lots of steps over an amorphous period of time. And I'd like to have this worked on by then...

Thanks in advance, HiveMind.

What is the title of this book?

Uncle — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 21:58:42 -0800

Identify a book for my girlfriend please. Read in the mid 90's maybe had 'children' in the title. Sci-fi novel about children held captive with woman in a castle after being placed with her through a government forced foster system (children are lent out to childless people for one month). They survive nuclear meltdown and years after by being put into suspended animation. When they wake up thousands of years have passed and they are kept subdued with drugged wine. David(?), the main character, escapes and finds a village of survivors who have become mutated from the radiation and inbreeding. They live off beetles and giant rabbits that have grown to the size of cattle. David has a close relationship with a girl in the castle and returns to save her?

Four of the clock it was, so I as I guesse

zvs — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:57:54 -0800

How can I estimate the time that a photo was taken? I'm working on a rephotography project (the link is my profile website, if you want an idea of what I'm dealing with). I've gotten the hang of many of the common problems I encounter when duplicating photos, but one thing still gets me -- time of day. I try to estimate based on the angle of a shadow, but that usually only gets me within a three hour window, and I hate sitting around waiting for the sun to move.

I'm a good enough geometer that I can usually figure out what the angle of a shadow is relative to true north using Photoshop, a street map, and a protractor. I have the date each photo was taken. I know NYC is about 15 minutes off of true noon for the time zone, and I know the angle varies seasonally. How can I do the math?

Can I use the Time Management Matrix in my software?

Anonymous — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:07:18 -0800

Can I use the "Time Management Matrix" in a commercial software product without any legal repercussions? (If you're not familiar with the Time Management Matrix, you can find a good primer here.)

My understanding is that the Matrix was popularized by Stephen Covey's book First Things First, and was later featured in some of his other books. Since then it has been widely used in motivational and leadership books and seminars. There are dozens of articles and pages about it online. It very likely existed in other forms, at least in concept, before Covey wrote about it.

I am interested in including a visual representation, description, and interactive version of this Matrix in a piece of commercial software I am writing. Without giving away too much of the application's functionality, essentially a user will be able to click one of the quadrants of the Matrix to assign a task to it, view a list of tasks sorted by quadrant, etc. The software would also include a brief description of the Matrix and its quadrants, with no direct quotations from Covey's book or any other sources. In fact, I don't plan on mentioning Covey at all (unless I must for attribution) in order to avoid any implications of endorsement.

Would I run into any legal issues if I do this? I can't find any solid evidence on whether Covey invented the concept or the term, so that's the first thing I need to find out. After that, I need to know what I can do if he does have some claim of ownership to it.

What to do in a month?

LSK — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:01:02 -0800

Things to accomplish in 1 month? I have about a month and a week left in Chicago before heading off to university. That's not enough time to get a job/engage in entrepreneurship, but it's too much time to waste. What worthwhile things can I do to fill the time?

When to book to get cheapest flights?

ragtimepiano — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 22:23:21 -0800

Given that the airlines are reducing the numbers of flights due to the economic downturn, what is the optimal time to book cheap flights? In the past, I've had great success booking domestic flights 2-3 days before. This time, we will be booking 2 round trip tickets. I just booked a flight from the western US to Montreal for my husband, three weeks ahead, as we found the planes were filling up rapidly. We didn't get much of a deal. Standby is not on option as I'll be flying with an autistic person. Any and all hive-mind thoughts are welcome. Thanks!

Simple, useful skills.

Orange Pamplemousse — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:55:41 -0800

What are some useful skills or abilities that can be learned in a short amount of time, and are never forgotten? Examples that I can think of include knot tying, rolling (from a fall), throwing a football and of course riding a bicycle. I'd especially like to know of potentially lifesaving actions that are extremely simple, but unlikely to come up in day-to-day life (eg. Stop, drop and roll for someone who is on fire).

Was the entire universe created by the Big Bang, or is the space/time generated by the Big Bang part of a larger universe?

Lownotes — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:55:20 -0800

Was the entire universe created by the Big Bang, or is the space/time generated by the Big Bang part of a larger universe? I was astounded recently to discover that the known universe has been measured from end to end, and it is 165 billion light years wide.

So, if you look at it that way, all of space/time is now a big egg-like ovoid of matter and energy.

If all the matter and energy generated by the Big Bang is now a gigantic ovoid:

1. Where is the Milky Way located in that ovoid?

2. If we are closer to one end than the other, do the photos we have of the most distant reaches of the known universe depict the far end or the near end?

3. Is this giant egg the entire universe, or is there space/time beyond the ovoid in which other Big Bangs could have occurred.

4. If there are other ovoids, will we ever be able to detect them?

buying home - pay for unused existing fuel?

SirStan — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:37:42 -0800

First time homebuyer - "its customary to purchase the unused fuel from the seller" urf? I am 2 months into purchasing a home; jumped numerous hurdles; and finally tomorrow am hopefully signing 30 years away.

The Realtor sprung this jem on me today -- they said "it is customary for the buyer to purchase the fuel oil that is present from the seller".

I am buying from the same Realtor that is selling the place -- but my purchase and sale does not mention the fuel oil.

So my friends -- what gives?