The Friday Fillip

Got the time? Who’s got time anymore. Time was… My best time ever.

Oh, and billable time.

Slaves to the clock and the watch (and now the cell phone), we need to know the time. So this week’s fillip is a Slaw Six, offering up half a dozen somewhat amusing ways to know when your time is coming… now… up… and gone.

1. The broad strokes first: you’ve got to know what day it is before that fact that it’s twenty to nine can have any real impact. To help you out in that regard let’s make use of the “Human Calendar.” We’re looking at you, Friday.
2. Face time is working well for us, so let’s stick with people, as we fraction our day into the hours and minutes and seconds that add up even if we don’t do the math. Artist Billy Chasen found a site with the numbers 0 to 9 formed by dancers (or contortionists). He took these human integers and worked them into an online digital clock that keeps you up to the minute.
3. Now it may be that you’ve go no time for this separation of date and late and would prefer to have it all in a row, because, after all what are days but big minutes, when you come to think of it. The Industrious Clock is just the thing, and the boss / client would approve: the thing is just so damn busy.
4. But what if your attention is distracted from the screen and you loose track of time? KuKu Klok has the answer. It’s a website that lets you set an alarm clock for any time you like. You can choose the noise that will bring you back to/from reality, too: the rooster’s my currrent fave.
5. Technology, however, can offer us something rather more precise and authoritative than contortionists or scribbles or even roosters. I’m thinking, this time, of the National Research Council of Canada (you know: those “after the long dash” people). If you should ever doubt that your computer is telling you the up-to-the-minute truth, you can check with the NRC for an exact take on the time via their Web Clock. It will give you atomic-powered, “Cesium-diem” time down to the second, and even warn you about a second or two loss due to latency on the internet. The time was accurate when it left the NRC but may be a bit off by the time it gets to you. Lovely.
6. This last temporal lob is a bit… different. The NRC still broadcasts a short wave time signal. For those of you younger than I, which is to say the Slaw readership, short wave radio was what existed even before classical music on CBC. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can hear that very time signal on the Listening Post. The site lets you control a short wave radio and listen to the signal it’s receiving. In the case of the NRC time signal, I’ve discovered that you want to set the Listening Post’s tuning controls to a frequency of 7335 and leave the modulation set to AM. It’s best if you then listen to the compressed (60 seconds) signal. Retro, sure. But nifto.