Atomic Time

I thought I was running late this morning. Not the typical "Monday morning 5 minutes" late sort, it was more of the "where hell did my morning go" variety. As I drove my daughter to school I glanced down at the clock. I expected to see "8:45" or something in that vicinity but it said, in very loud green LED, "11:52".  If you happen to be in the suburbs of Boston this morning and head an odd snapping sound, that was my brain literally ripping in half. I could have sworn I left the house around 20 of 9....

The problem with not having caffeine in the morning is that one's brain has a tendency to shoot off into the strangest of directions and what would normally seem like absolute lunacy takes on a much more "absolutely logical" feeling. So rather than assume, "damn my clock is wrong" and went with the "my god, I've lost hours". I'm pretty sure this sort of decaffeinated thinking explains 99% of all alien abductions. Luckily after a few seconds of abject horror my brain found some residual caffeine in the recesses of my cranium and realized it was in fact the clock that was wrong and not the universe collapsing on itself.

Being a geek this got my thinking that what I really need is an atomic car clock. And once I reached the office I decided to find one. Unfortunately I found nothing. But I did find some C# code for syncing up with an atomic clock using the Network Time Protocol (NTP).

C# NTP  Client - This is a code sample by Valer Bocan in Romania. I've not done much with it yet but looked fun.

Dimention4 - Free atomic clock sync software. Works really well.

U.S. Navy - The U.S. Navy has a simply web page with US times for each time zone on it.

Funny. Now that I think about it... I never fixed the clock in the car.