01/13/03’s illustrious band:

Timecap

Brought to you by a note on a colleague’s office door.

A timecap is not headgear you wear to travel through the fourth dimension. It’s short for time capsule. The colleague mentioned is celebrating a birthday, and a friend had used a timecap service to create a page displaying lists of headlines, top songs, TV shows, new toys and books, prices for common purchases, Academy Award winners, government leaders, and other important people born on the same day. All you have to do to generate a timecap sheet is go to http://dmarie.com/timecap and input the relevant birthdate.

If you hit “Quick Page,” the software immediately generates your timecap page. If you choose “Advanced Page,” you’ll be taken through a series of steps in which you choose the items from each category that you want to display. The list of people born on the same date is especially long, so you can just pick the ones you like best. The resulting timecap page is suitable for printing and posting on office doors, or I suppose you could copy and past the information into the format of your choice. This can be a nice way to mark a special day or just do a little then-and-now reflecting.

I tried the process with my own birthdate, just to see. Nixon was president when I was born. The list of shows on TV at the time includes Star Trek, I Dream of Jeannie, Dragnet and Hawaii Five-O. Slaughterhouse Five was published that year (1969), and stamps cost $.06. The average price of a house was $27,900, and average annual household income was $10,577. Silly String, Weebles, Nerf Balls and Barrel of Monkeys hit the toy stores. Candice Bergen (1946), Billy Joel (1949) and Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265) share my birthday.

I’m pleased to say that Candice, Billy, the Star Trek franchise and I are still going strong.

Public Opinion Poll

The burning question: Should I buy a Palm Pilot or not?

Pros

• It's a shiny new tech toy.
  
• I recently got a rebate check that would cover about 75% of the cost.
  

Cons

• I already have an electronic organizer that works just fine and does not need updating.
  
• Even with the rebate check, this would still cost me around $60.
  

So I must decide between the sober, responsible, money-saving option and the frivolous, entertaining, economy-stimulating one. What would YOU do?

(I'd ask "What Would Jesus Do?", but I don't think Jesus ever had to worry about Palm Pilots. Just Pontius Pilate.)