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It all started innocently enough. The notebook didn't fit in my pocket, and my N93 was already there.

If I had a million Euros

kevin_s2f | 19 May, 2007 02:13

I have to say the title of this entry originally came into my American brain as “If I had a million dollars”, but with the exchange rate now I’d much rather have a million euros.

Either way, what I want to talk about is what I’d like to do with this multimedia journal if I had a sky-high budget and an expert staff. Not that I have either of those resources, but I always find when preparing a plan it’s best to dream first, scale down to reality later. You have to perform that reality check before you’ve spent resources you don’t have, but without some long-term vision it’s tough to make good day-to-day choices.

Photo by Hans Peter some rights reserved.

So here’s my wish list.

I’d like use this journal in three primary scenarios:

When tasting new items, whether the item’s a bottle of fine wine or a strange new chocolate confection. The journal needs to be intuitive and add to the enjoyment of the tasting experience, not intrusive to the point that it takes my attention away from my friends and the tasting itself.
When stocking my wine cellar and pantry. I want to be able to refer to the journal when browsing a market – in person or on line.
When selecting items from my cellar and pantry. In particular, I have a walk-in cellar on my property, but there is only enough space for one person. In practice that means that selecting items for a special occasion tends to be a singular activity where somebody emerges with a selection or two. The process could be much more of a shared experience if the inventory of the cellar was accessible on my N93.

Items 2 and 3 come down to searches of records created under use case 1. So I need to think ahead to record retrieval, sorting, tagging, etc. Not sure that a full-blown database is required, but I need to at least think about retrieval and sorting as I design how to store the tasting records created during scenario 1.

As long as I’m in dreaming mode, I would love to be able to correlate serial tastings of the same item. We have some wines that we have cellared for 6 or 7 years. It would be fun to compare notes as the wines, and our palletes, have matured.

That leaves item 1

I want to record each tasting experience as a series of pictures and voice clips. Maybe videos, but given the storage requirements and the number of records I want to hold on the N93, that’s probably not practical.
I want to be able to tag a tasting record to categorize it, but I don’t want to force the tagging to occur during the tasting itself. In a dark restaurant, with a T-9 keypad, tagging will require too much focus.
The elements of a tasting experience I want to capture include the people with whom I share the experience, the place in which the experience takes place, and my impressions during the experience.
Each of these elements of the tasting experience may be documented with zero, one, or more photos and zero, one, or more voice clips.
The order in which these elements will be recorded is not predictable.

All this leads me to the opening assumption that a tasting record will consist of:

A collection of media files, where the file extension identifies the media type (e.g. *.JPG = photo)
One XML document with pointers to the media files and a schema that describes the relationships among and allows random collection of the tasting elements.

That’s what I’d do if I had an unlimited budget. But of course I don’t.

I’m going to enjoy the dream over the weekend, and next week I’ll start talking reality.