Time

I have this impression that time is soft, malleable, that it will expand (at least slightly) to accommodate by wishes. Even when it doesn't I don't change my vision of time, I acknowledge that I didn't schedule appropriately. Sometimes, though, time is hard and fast and shiny and slippery, and there's nothing I can do to slow it down or push it back. I wish I knew how to see time as non-linear in practice and not just conceptually, for times like this when the website should have gone live 40 minutes ago and it's still not ready and our tech genius is frazzled and there's nothing I can do to help. (I bought Diet Coke. I now know how to clear my browsing history so as to re-test the site. That's... all I've got. FOR NOW.)

When building an interactive theatre-experience website, give yourself at least an extra day to get things up and running. Make sure you do everything possible to de-stress your web designer, and learn Flash and other website-building technology skills (and figure out the ins-and-outs of web hosting/servers). The navigation "tree" is important to let everyone know how things are supposed to work, and having someone nearby to help test and at least a few other computers to upload videos would also be useful (as well as getting other team members trained on video-editing).

It's not that I'd like to go back in time, necessarily - but I would like to 'layer' time and go back to try this first project overlaid with the knowledge I've got now. (In many ways, a second project would be more encouraging, and probably just as educational - once the first experience has worked the bugs/process/methodology out, the second would be the place to explore!)

There is so much to learn. And by my own reasoning, there are at least a couple of websites to build before I can reasonably know what I'm doing. If I had video-taped the original process of building a website, I could play it back while working on the next... It doesn't exactly break time out of it's linear format, but it might be the closest I can come just now...

Hard at work... still...