Hundred thousand changes, everything's the same

I'm a stickler for time. It's not that I'm exceedingly punctual, but I like to know what time it is. More to the point, I like everyone to agree on what time it is. A clock that is inaccurate isn't a clock at all. Agreeing on what time it is is the foundation of civilization.

To this extent, I don't like the fact that Windows doesn't let you include the seconds in the clock in the system tray. OS X does. BeOS does. Even UNIX users can run the dclock program from inside XFree86. But Windows is sadly, tragically, typically, the last remaining holdout to join the "show seconds" revolution.

To remedy this problem, there's a application called DesktopX, which I first heard about on The Screen Savers a few weeks ago. DesktopX is an application which lets you run programmable floating objects on your Windows desktop: things like a Google toolbar, or a calendar. Well naturally, there's also a clock object. But the default clock object is an analog clock, which, though nice, is decidely not what I want. Fortunately, there are plenty of third party objects for DesktopX, including a digital clock that shows seconds. It's not as convenient as having the seconds displayed in the system tray, but it's better than nothing.

You probably know why seeing seconds on my Windows workstation is so important. Yes, it's about the PBX switch. As I've mentioned before, synchronizing the clock on a PBX switch is difficult because it has a primitive set of time tools and very little room to build upon them. So if you skew the clock by a constant amount every day, it should be close enough for no one to notice a discrepancy.

But of course, I notice. And after a while, the skew builds up in the opposite direction. The clock stops being slow and starts gradually getting faster. It's not actually ticking any faster, you've just told it to overcompensate: add a second and a half when a second and a quarter will do. So I knocked the skew down by 100 milliseconds. This stabilized it, but it stabilized it at four seconds fast.

Rats.

Now I'm in a cat-and-mouse game of hunting the right skew to begin slowing the clock down again, but not by so much that I can't increase the skew and keep the clock synced once it hits that magic day when my Windows machine and the display on my phone are in perfect harmony.