The following notes are for the Gearhead column "All at sea with Xcelsius":
We found several online references to "Short Timers Clock" and it appears to be applied specifically to countdowns and more commonly to countdowns to retirement. We found no etymology of the phrase.
Corporate or enterprise dashboards are huge business now. See Wikipedia's discussion of digital dashboards for a good background as well as the clumsily named blog The Dashboard Spy Blog on Enterprise Dashboards (guys, what were you thinking?).
Business Objects' Crystal Xcelsius has a gallery of very good dashboard examples. Also check out their Free Business Widgets for salesforce.com.
And join the Gibbs Irregulars.
|
|
Not the right dates, I hope
It might not seem like much, but I do hope the dates listed on your "Mission Clock" are not the right dates, nothing like giving the bad guys months of preparation. I've used and odified the Excel version for a few years already but never provided the dates to the public. Even my family didn't know when I was coming back from a deployment until we were just a couple of days away, and even then we used a code.
Your program is nice, and I always read your column, keep it up.
Luis
I'm still here, so ...
As far as I know the return dates aren't classified … if they are I'm sure someone with a black helicopter will by dropping by.
I'm trying to create a version that will allow for customization so the start and end dates of a mission and the user's home and away time zones will be entered on first run but that seems to be kind of tricky with the tools I'm using. Perhaps in a couple of weeks I'll figure out how to make it work.
Anyway, glad you liked the program and keep on reading.
Short-Timers Clock
It was originally the "Short-Timers Calendar" for people who were getting out of the service. It counted down from 100 to OUT (0), and usually was in the form of a picture you colored in day by day. It 'usually' brought glee to shipmates when they got down to 1 digit midgets. It then kinda moved to deployment count-downs, which were always subject to change.