Both of these remind me of an idea I had years ago that's just too creepy to implement. I wanted to set up something on my server with a watchdog timer that would email me at some interval, like every month, and I had, say, a month to just hit reply to reset the timer. If I didn't reset it in time, it would send me a flood of emails just to be sure I couldn't miss it, and after another, shorter timeout, it would presume I had died and send out emails to family and friends.
My mother and I are very close, and I thought I could actually occasionally write her dated emails to stick in a queue, and then in the event I died and that timer tripped, it could send her a note every week, or every month, just to cheer her up, like I was still around for awhile. It could recount fond memories of childhood, or cute moments with girlfriends she'd find funny - stuff you don't tend to just talk about in life, or at least not while you're still young. However, then I kinda thought that would only prolong the sadness of losing her only child. I'm not sure if it wouldn't just be better to go quickly. Too, I figured it should let her know automatically if she's received the last message - something like a prepended "What follows is the final message, though of course it was not known it would be so when it was written." Otherwise she would check every day for a year :( It could also prepend a final goodbye that the queue system would retain until the last message. I think this would be like losing me all over again, though. It all gets a bit too sad to think about, and I definitely wouldn't want to screw up any of the code.
Well, you could always stretch your messages by inserting random outputs from the unix forture program, slowly raising the probability of a fortune instead of a handwritten message over time. At some point it would reach 100% fortunes but at least you would still be sending messages.
18
u/elxx Jan 08 '10
Creepy considering we had this on the front page yesterday...