I looked at the software again,  to research something I’m writing. But it starts me off wrong. I’ll redo the start page, and say:

How to begin?

We don’t know much at the start.

A cast of characters, some places… You’ll add more later, and drop some.

We want the start dates for each. With someone’s birthday, the software can tell us their age at any point; or for a place, how long there.

We’ll start the timeline with the earliest of these birth dates or start dates, so pick these first few people or places with that in mind.

We’re looking for the overall length of the timeline, and its ends. We can change anything later, but this change takes longer. So guess a length now, and guess on the high side: a week, a year, a decade, three centuries….

So start with that: a list of people and places with start dates, and a length for the whole thing.

Or else for lack of anything better we’ll start with three people called Abc, Def, and Ghi, all born sixty years ago today, and a timeline sixty years long.

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There’s a better and a worse way to move an event closer to the right date, when you don’t know the date at first, and you can only estimate a wide time range for it, a range with the right date inside it somewhere.

Here’s an example.  You have a picture of Robin rowing.

Summer of a certain year, you know, so you enter “Robin rowing” on the Robin band (blue) inside a range from early May to late September of that year (the dark vertical lines):

You’ll add the picture at some point, and you’ll see a thumbnail of the picture in the empty box above.

Who’s that with her in the boat?  Robert.  You give Robert a band of his own, in green, but you have no clues about him this far back.

Then you find a letter from Robert’s mother thanking Robin’s mother for keeping Robert at their lake house for a week while her father was in the hospital.  You put “Robert arrives” on the green band.  You know the week and day.

That’s a clue to the date of the picture of Robin rowing.

You edit the time ranges  and select the time range around “Robin rowing,” which is then outlined in red:

Now you have two ways to move “Robin rowing” towards “Robert Arrives”.

You can move “Robin rowing” to the left inside its time range, from 50% to 40% or whatever, where the percent says how far into the time range you want the event to appear.

That’s not the best way.

The best way is to narrow the time range around “Robin rowing”:

Drag the right and left edges of the time range (in red) closer to “Robert arrives”.  This is the time range for “Robin rowing” on the blue band, so now you know the date of this picture to within a week.  A clue on the green band gave you a better date on the blue band.

You want to narrow all these time ranges towards exact dates, or as nearly as you can.

Use the percent where you have more than one event in a time range.  Use the percent to space out the events so they don’t crowd and hide one another as you narrow their time range.

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I looked for this software and when I couldn’t find it, I built it.

What told me I needed this software? How did I do this before WhoWhereWhen? Why wasn’t that good enough? What else did I need?

I needed this for court.

Before WhoWhereWhen I kept one document I called Timeline (it could have been a spreadsheet, but it was a text document, not Word but a Google text document). It looked like this:

2010
(at start, married 10 years 8 months, Eva age 10 years 3 months)
15Jan2010 book launch Seth Godin Linchpin with Joel; see Kat James The Truth of Beauty
09Feb2009 met with Don B
23Mar2009 Wilbert the Whale
16May2009 wedding Colleen

Important dates that would be hard to look up later, that is.  One line each, with date first and note after, so all the dates line up one below another for fast scanning.

Notice under the year 2010 I wrote:

(at start, married 10 years 8 months, Eva age 10 years 3 months)

I was forever calculating how long and how old.  How long had I been married at that point.  How old was my daughter at that point?  I did each calculation two or three times, because it’s easy to get wrong.   This note at the start of each year warned me if I was way off.

I needed automatic How Old? and How Long?  Instantly, with certainty.

The other problem: Kat James is an old girlfriend who has a new book, Don B is a new client, the wedding is for my sister’s youngest in another state, and Wilbert the Whale is a song from my daughter’s farewell-to-elementary concert.

It’s a jumble.  All mixed together: His business, her business, dating, family, daughter, stepkids, son away at college in another state….

I need automatic How Old? and How Long? on each of those.

How long have I had this client?

How long since I last saw that girlfriend?  How long since her book came out?  How old is she now?

How old is my sister’s youngest?  How long since I went to her high school graduation?  How close is my sister to retirement?

How long were we in that house?  How long did I have that apartment in the city?  How long for both, before I sold the apartment.  How long between selling the apartment and buying the business for my new wife?

Like that.

With answers like that, I was quick on the draw in court, and the other side looked untrustworthy for not having these answers, or guessing and getting them wrong.

Sure, I needed a way to display selected data in the courtroom.  That’s the easy part.  You can find lots of timeline programs to do that.  The court didn’t need to know about my old girlfriend or her new book, so I needed to separate things, and only show what pertained.

I needed bands, parallel timelines for each thing, the girlfriend, her book, the client, my business, the house, the apartment, the business for my wife, my son, my daughter, my marriage, my stepkids….  Each Who or What or Where.

I needed to see those separate timelines in parallel, together but separate.  On parallel tinted bands.

I needed an automatic How Old? or How Long? on every band, instantly, for each Who or What or Where.

Then I could jump from band to band: How old was my daughter when we closed that business?

But I had more questions than answers, and I needed a way to put a question on the timeline, on its own band, before I knew the dates and answers.  I needed the timeline tool to take me from question to answer, help me arrive at the right dates.  I needed a way to get closer and closer answers as I went along.

For example, we closed that business just before we went to my son’s graduation from high school in another state.  My daughter went with me.  One of the last times she rode in a car seat, so she could see out the window.  The graduation date on one band gives me the business closing date on another band.

Some dates I never know exactly, but I get close.  I get the time range down to five or ten days, and then the day of week (it was a Sunday, say) takes me the rest of the way.

In my text timeline, before I built the WhoWhereWhen software, I started making bands.  At the bottom I collected dates about my son, or about my business, or about the court case.  I made a separate heading for each at the bottom, and copied dates from the main timeline to the heading.  When I had a loose idea of the date at first and then a better idea of the date later, I had to fix the date in both places.

And when I tightened my answer about some date, I needed to tighten related dates on other bands.  For example, when did my son graduate high school?  May or June of 2007.  That’s a two-month range at the beginning.  When I got  closer to the date, I had to fix it in two places, then go to other dates with the new clue.  The business closing date, for example.  Also in two places, the main timeline and the separate business timeline at the bottom.

I got winning answers this way, powerful ammunition in court, but so much work, and so much still to do with court deadlines coming.  In court you get one chance and it won’t matter if you find God’s own truth a week too late….

So I built the WhoWhereWhen software.  A better future from a better knowledge of the past.

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Dragnet.

Look at this face.  Joe Friday of Dragnet.  The world-weary detective has seen it all, more than most of us could stomach.  Pained, and still faintly disgusted, he chooses his battles with care, and sidesteps the rest.

I was thinking of Dragnet as a name for this WhoWhereWhen software.  Your net may drag up more than you were looking for.  I have seen it happen, for one of our early users.  I have seen that Joe Friday look on his face.

Dragnet was an early forensics show, giving details of police work and detective methodology in the radio and early TV era.

The term “dragnet” is a police term taken  from fishing.  Not sport fishing or solitary fishing, but a team effort by the men of a village, a tug-of-war that drags a huge net through the shallows and onto shore with hundreds of fish inside.

So in detective work, a dragnet is a way of searching for a suspect with every member of the force pulling together, not the hit-or-miss efforts of a detective or two over time.  The dragnet surrounds a hidden suspect who might flee, and closes off all routes of escape.  Then the dragnet slowly tightens, closing in on the hidden suspect from all directions.

Like a dragnet, WhoWhereWhen weaves a net around your questions, hunches, and suspicions, a net of horizontal strands and vertical strands, with various Who and What and Where on the horizontal bands (Edna, the cabin, the skiff), and time ranges on the vertical (“When was Edna at the cabin when  we had that skiff there?  Not sure.  Between Spring of 1998 and Autumn of 1999, I know that much.”

In this dragnet, only the vertical tightens, the time range, as you close in on the exact dates of something or other (“Ah, we got the skiff last week of September, an end-of-season sale, just before we closed the cabin for the season, but which year? Edna went to Spain for two years in January 1999, so it was 1998, the last of September in 1998….”

WhoWhereWhen is forensic software, investigative software, and I have seen that Joe Friday look from one of our earliest users.

Joe, let’s call him.  Joe used WhoWhereWhen to prepare for court when his wife sued for divorce.  Second marriage for both of them.  When did he lose her, he wondered, in the course of their ten-year marriage.

In the beginning he sold his apartment in the city for a gain of 350 thousand and moved in with her, an hour outside the city.

He entered that into WhoWhereWhen, with links to documents that gave the dates and details.  She had two kids at home, an older girl and a younger boy, not yet in high school.

He entered that into WhoWhereWhen, with his wife on one band, the boy on another, and the girl on another.

He bought two gym locations for her to operate and she was so happy for a time.

He entered that into WhoWhereWhen, with two new bands for the two locations, and links to receipts and letters and such, that gave the dates.

The gyms were a bad investment and failed, for everyone.  Was that it, he wondered?  When was that?  Early 2005.

He entered that into WhoWhereWhen….

Yes, she had been shrieking horrible things around that time.  Shocked, and wondering if she needed help of some kind, he had written some of them down.  She was a psychiatric nurse, though.  She would know for herself, wouldn’t she?

He entered that into WhoWhereWhen….

Were her two kids still at home to hear that?  He looked.  No, they moved in with their father in a neighboring state the summer before.

He entered that into WhoWhereWhen, approximately for now….

His wife took that hard, when her two kids moved in with their father.  She blamed Joe, though Joe had heard that plan from the time he first met her kids and their father.  It was their dream to go to school in that wealthy state, if and when their father could afford it.  Their father and mother had gone bankrupt and nearly lost the house before Joe arrived.  Joe brought the mortgage current and made major and long-overdue repairs to the house.

He entered receipts and dates into WhoWhereWhen….

Joe removed two illegal renters from the home and paid a fine.  Then he renovated those spaces.  Their living space doubled.

He entered court citations and receipts and dates into WhoWhereWhen….

His wife had twice lost her job just before they married.  No fault of hers, but the companies failed.  Her job was life and death to her daughter, though.  Her daughter had survived a major birth defect and needed expensive medicines every month and expensive surgeries every year as long as she stayed alive.  Joe supplied health insurance and paid for a surgeon the insurance would not cover.

When was that surgery?  Joe entered that into WhoWhereWhen, with his best guess about the date range.

The daughter (Amy, let’s say) had just reached puberty.  How old?  She had a tutor while she recovered at home for six weeks, a tutor from the high school.

Joe tightened the date range around that surgery.

It was her freshman year, 2001-2002.  Early in the year, because she was afraid of falling behind for months to come.  Not quite two years, then, after Joe married her mother.

Joe stared at the picture in WhoWhereWhen.  The net had begun to tighten around something.  Something was swimming into view.  Joe felt sick.

His new wife had told him F- Y- in slow motion, in an exorcist voice, early in their marriage.  When was that?

Joe entered that into WhoWhereWhen as a question, with a huge date range around it, to start with.

That was after a Christmas pageant.  He had sent her troubled son to a special school for a year.  A year at the school cost more than Joe’s car.  His last year before high school.  The year of his sister’s surgery.

They had just come out of the Christmas pageant on campus.Within a few weeks after that surgery, then.  Joe tightened that time range in WhoWhereWhen.

Her son had sung in the pageant that night.  They had just gotten to the car afterwards.  In the dark, waiting for other cars to move, Joe said he liked the pageant and the people, and the way their skits made Christmas funny.  His wife leaned close to his ear and opened her teeth as wide as they would go and groaned F- Y- into his ear, in slow motion.  He had a sick feeling then, and a sick feeling now, entering it into WhoWhereWhen.  Like seeing the  girl’s head turn all the way around in the Exorcist, or her words come out in bass baritone, with frost on her breath.

What was that, he asked her, when he saw she was not joking.  He asked then and got no answer.  He asked many times later.  She gave a different half-hearted explanation each time.  Maybe, Joe thought, someone had offended her that night.  They were snooty at that school, as she put it.  Not her kind of people.

Her strange unhappiness had begun long before their businesses failed. WhoWhereWhen gave Joe the age of the boy at any point, and the age of the girl, and the age of the marriage, and the age of the businesses, each on its own band.

They had just started their first location at the time, and customers saw the sign that said Coming Soon, and wrote letters asking where they could send their money.

She was shrieking at him long before the businesses failed, when the businesses were booming.  The weave of WhoWhereWhen was tightening around something, and Joe began to make out the shape.

Their father came to the Christmas pageant that night.  Maybe he said something to upset Joe’s wife.  About the kids going to a different school in a different state, maybe.  That old plan was no longer just talk.   Their father had begun to put that plan in motion.  Was that what upset Joe’s wife?  That night and from then on?

He saw it now.

She had married Joe to keep her kids from leaving, from going with their father.  Their father had recently remarried.  If he remarried, she could compete with that.  She could remarry too.

When her kids left anyhow, she was ready to leave too.  Leave Joe.

She had married him for her daughter’s medicine and surgery.  She had never loved him.

Joe tried to see it another way, but he was stuck.  Caught in his own net.

Now you know what’s behind that look on Joe Friday’s face.  The dragnet dredges up things no one wants to see….

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One more thought about Dragnet.

In a Dragnet episode, Joe Friday is piecing together a story that has already happened.  A crime, usually.  We follow him as he tries find out what happened.  We get  the story of Joe Friday finding out the story of some perp.  The story of getting the story.  The story of the story coming to light.  At the start of the episode, one story has already happened, the other is just beginning.

You could work out either story in WhoWhereWhen.  You could plan Joe Friday’s story before it happens.  Storyboard it.  Now you’re putting the future into WhoWhereWhen.  Things that have not happened yet.

We told how someone used WhoWhereWhen in his divorce case.  He was a Joe Friday, turning here and there to find out what had happened, what had gone wrong.  His research was a story too.  The story of an investigation, a mystery to solve.

If you had to tell what he found, and how he found it,  you could lay out his steps in WhoWhereWhen.  Storyboard it, as they say.

And beyond that, use WhoWhereWhen as a planning tool.  Plan your research.  Plan your investigation.  Plan your reporting.  You put in future events as tasks, with your best idea of when you will get to them.  As that future gets closer, your estimates get closer.

This is WhoWhereWhen as a Gantt chart.  A project plan.  Who does what when, if it’s all to add up at the end.

WhoWhereWhen for investigation.  WhoWhereWhen for storyboarding.   WhoWhereWhen for project planning….

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Just tell the truth.  It’s easier to remember.

How many times have we heard that?

I heard it again in this video by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

By the way, send this link to the high school English teacher who told you not to say Ummm or Uhhhh during a book report.  This guy is almost singing Ummm and Uhhhh.  Singing a duet, one guy giving the official line, in words, and an evil twin mocking him with Ummmm and Uhhhhh….  Does Paul Graham know that?  You bet.  This talk is a two-for-one…

Truth is stateless, he says, and ulterior motives don’t scale.  That’s how they talk on Planet Lisp.  He made his fame and fortune building a web-building tool in Lisp, and here he’s talking to Internet start-ups.

The trouble with lying is you have to remember too much, he says.  You have to remember everything you’ve said in the past in order not to contradict yourself.

True.  I have been in a year-long court contest for custody of my daughter, who is now ten.  The court, I have learned, is looking for falsity, not truth.  The first party to go over the falsity limit loses.  So if you tell the truth more than once, or dozens of times, the other side will look for falsity in every difference.  That’s an old trick among lawyers.  Make the other side tell their story over and over, and pry apart any difference between one telling and another.

I think Graham is wrong though, in one way.  The truth is no easier to remember than lies.  Or I would not have needed this WhoWhereWhen software so badly.  I put this last year of the trial into WhoWhereWhen, and I put my ten year marriage into it.  I should know this already, right, because I was there, and this was my life?

Nope, don’t count on it.

I remember a question from the judge on the first day.  Why did you do such-and-such?  What were you thinking?

I gave a good answer, I thought.

But later, when I looked at that day and that week with WhoWhereWhen, I slapped my forehead.  Of course!  No wonder!  Who wouldn’t?!  I have a much better answer today than I did a year ago, when all of this was much more recent to me.

You are a stranger now to the person you were then.  The other side can know your history better than you do.  That’s murder in court.  But if you do your homework, you can know your history and theirs better than they do.  That’s what I built WhoWhereWhen for.  First I looked for it, but when I couldn’t find it, I built it.  The stakes have never been higher for me.

We’ll hold for another time what Diane Loftus has discovered about memory in and out of the courtroom.  Meanwhile try this.  Think of a camel.  Are you remembering that camel, or imagining it?   What’s the use of that question?  Why do we have two words for this, remember and imagine?  What’s the difference?

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First,  a note for users, then a tech note.

You are preparing for a court appearance.  Cases are won before you step into the courtroom, your attorney tells you, by the quality of your preparations.

Your ex-husband paid $16k for to send your son (his stepson) to a private school at a difficult time in the boy’s life.  He paid $19k for a surgery your daughter (his stepdaughter) needed, but insurance would not cover.

You know the date of the surgery, within about a two week range.  But while working on that, you got the bands backwards.  You put her surgery on his band (Robert), and his tuition on her band (Robin).

Easy.  You drag the first event, her surgery, down to her band, and drag his tuition to the band above.

Nothing else changes.  The dates and description and linked documentation stay the same for both events.  Only the band changes.  Now when you want just his events or hers, but not both, you select the band…

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