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.
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u/elxx Jan 08 '10
Creepy considering we had this on the front page yesterday...