Diary in 8 Dimensions?

Normal diaries

Many have written diaries in their lives. In the old days, one took out a paper notebook during some quiet time in the evenings and wrote his experiences and thoughts of the day.

Later, when the computer age dawned, the paper notebook was replaced with a software notebook. That’s essentially still basic note taking, and we can term it as in one dimension. Of course, one recorded time, but mainly that’s the time of writing the diary. And one might also write a location, like “Cambridge, MA”, and it’s about the proximity and in words, again mainly of the time of writing.

Then after the new millennium, these software notebooks are getting more sophisticated. As one started to write, the software automatically recorded the time, and at some later era, it also recorded a location coordinate. More sophisticated software would allow search by time and location of past diaries. But again the time and location are still at the time of writing. And this is still, though a little better, note-taking. And perhaps we can term it as in say 1.2 dimensions.

Then a new era dawned. Some software (mostly apps on the smart phones) allowed inclusion of photos. So that’s advancement in dimensions as photo is considered as 2 dimensional. But the number of photos is generally limited, and even if a few photos can be included, they are included in a lump-som way. So we can’t really count the entire 2 dimension of the photo in the diary, and we may term this diary as in 2.2 dimensions.

So what can you do with your diaries? You mostly just go back the timeline and review what you have put in.

One other limitation of this era aside from limited dimensions is that one’s diaries are locked with the app and the storage server of the app. If at some time for some reason one wants to use another app, one finds it difficult if not impossible to migrate the old diary data. OK, I know that this is a different issue from our topic here.

Diary in 8 dimensions

So what exactly is diary in 8 dimensions? It goes like this.

First the diary app records your location at a your pre-defined interval (say every 20 minutes). And of course the location carries a time stamp.

Second, when you start doing something, say ride a bicycle, you tap on the diary app to note the event of “bicycle” (or however you term it). With that, the app records the end time of the previous event, the name of this event, the start time and the start location. Note, the background rhythmic recording of locations is still going on as always.

Third, during the event, you can jot down notes into the event. You can also take photos to be attached to the event. Of course you can add notes and photos to any older event.

So all together, the time, event, location, notes and photos make your diaries in 8 dimensions.

OK, that sounds cool? But there is more. The purpose of recording these data is that later you will be able to analyze them.

So what can you do with the diaries in 8 dimensions?

Of course you can do it in the old way, and that is to go back and review what you have noted down. But there is much more you can do with your diary in 8 dimensions.

First you can check during a certain specified period (a past month, year, etc) what percentages of your time or how many hours are spent on what events. You will see that on a pie chart.

Then say you want to see how much time you spent on your meals each day, you tap “meal” (or however you term it) on the pie chart to get a X-Y plot with X-axis as the date and Y-axis as number of hours.

Then how about you want to see where you’ve been in some certain past period or your entire life? You specify the period and dots representing your past locations are marked on a map. Certainly the route of your bicycle trip will appear. Tap on a dot, you will see the exact time when you were at the location.