The Ponyfarm Clock

Wow, this is actually my very first post! How exciting! By the way, I was commenting under the name of “derkurze” before, but changed to “Mr Cat” now, to avoid any mix ups with Leo. I’m Felix.

So, the clock. The task is actually quite simple. The brief says, design a clock. Well, since it is so broad, it makes it a little difficult… We can literally do anything, however, we should program it. Or at least suggest how the end result would look like. So, I was thinking of a clock, that tells you what other people are up, where they are and what time it is where ever they are. I know, it is not the most original idea, but i wanted to do something that I can implement as well, and since my knowledge of programming is virtually non-existent – zero, nothing, nada – I want to do something reasonably simple. So, I had the vision of an arrivals/departure boards as you find in airports of large train-stations, and instead of telling the flight number, origin, or whatever, it shows the name of people, where they are, what time it is, where they are, and their current activity. Something like this:

This is just a quick visual I have done. It is not final, but I probably won’t change much. Now, I was thinking that we could have a ponyfarm clock, that shows the members of the blog. The ones in the visuals are friends I quickly thought of. So, under the name your blogging name will appear, instead of the real name, since the clock will be displayed somewhere in this blog hopefully (not sure if I can do that, but I am sure that possible somehow). The rest is pretty clear I think. The red and green dot refers to if you are active doing something (green) or sleeping and therefore inactive (red).

Now you come into play: rather than having one font for the whole board, I would like to have each person on the blog to have their information displayed in their own handwriting. That would personalize the whole thing – that’s really what it is about, rather than the very mechanical and structured display of planes landing and taking off. So, here is what I need from you guys: Write the alphabet in lower and upper case letters and numerals on a sheet of paper, scan it, or take a pic of it, and send it to me (felixack@hotmail.com). Please have all the characters separated, thanks! I also need your blogger name and where you are at the moment. That’s the first thing I need from you. Secondly, I need a list of activities that you do during a normal very ordinary day at a certain time. This is would be my list: 1am-7am sleeping, 7am-8am running, 8am shower, 8:30am breakfast, 9am going to a café, 11am tutorial at uni, 1pm lunch, 2pm working at uni, 4pm coffee break, 5pm working at uni, 7pm dinner, 8pm chilling, 10pm – 1am working for uni. Wow, that reads a bit scrary… Please don’t think I am a freak, my day is never that structured! If you could these two things for me, I’d be really, really thankful!

If you have any comments on how I could display the clock in the end, I would be glad to receive some ideas (like in a picture of a arrivals board), but that’s not that important for now.