Hail Eris! All hail Discordia! Percolate!
Erisian Klock ver 5:23 beta, a fine byproduct from Erisian Warez Corporation, is now ticking the hours, minutes and seconds of elastic length and width! I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about, which is good, so let me just say that I never understood why Discordians had their own calendar, incarnated in plenty executable/performable forms, but no Klock of their own time. Now they have both.
The Klock version 5:23 beta is yours to get right from this place (20 kb zip file). It is still in development, so if anyone out there would like to give it a test-tickin', please do so and let me know (a) if it bombs (it shouldn't) and (b) if you'd like any features added (it has quite a few already). If you'd like any features removed, I guess you're outta luck.
The Klock is a mess-dos executable; once I'm sure it does do what I think I was gonna try to sort of get it to be mostly able to maybe do sometimes, I'll translate it into JavaScript and Perl to spread the Klock more evenly than its current unportable form allows... Or maybe someone else will help me do the JavaScript thing, I can do Perl allright, but I do get sick of Java... Then maybe we should write an RFC for it ("C" for confusion here), you'll see for yourselves...
Update... The CGI version is ready! Get The Klock inside your browser! |
Now, here's HOW IT WORKS.
Erisian Time Measurement (ETM) was designed with two badly misaligned purposes in mind:
DTM was designed with much carelessness, cracking of teeth and confusion first about a year ago and then redesigned over the last two nights, so as to resemble no other time measure known to human beings dead or undead, except maybe cabbages, and to be as Discordian as possible if I may say so myself don't go yet you've gotta read this through and do you believe this?
Now.
Before I unload the principles of DTM on you, a brief word about Naming Conventions. So far, only one Erisian Time Unit (ETU) has been uniquely named (you'll see). All other ETUs inherit the commonly known, aneristic names of time units, being HOUR, MINUTE and SECOND. Sector6 and RAINBO Cabal members and affiliates are hereby kindly asked to invent some names for these three categories, or else we will stick to the aneristic names which is going to be even more confusing, since some Discordian HOURS are longer than normal hours, and some are shorter; same goes for other ETUs.
For the purpose of this document, when referring to ANERISTIC TIME UNITS, the following unit names will be used, now get this:
When referring to ERISTIC TIME UNITS, the same names will be used, except they will be put in quotes, thusly:
Allright. So if I say that an "hour" has 5 minutes, or else that a "second" is 12 seconds long, you'll know what I'm talking about, OK.
A day (here understood as 1 day and 1 night together consecutively, i.e. 24 real hours) has 1440 minutes (24*60).
If we divide the above number of minutes by 5, we get 1440 DIV 5 = 288. This number, 288, is more or less the number of Discordian "hours" in a day, but this is only the first approximation.
Remember that we started with 288 5-minute units. Of those, we subtracted 23 to make THUD. We are then left with 265 units to go.
Erisian day consists of:
...followed by:
You are not supposed to understand this.
If you are not yet convinced that the above MEASUREMENT contains HOLY PROPERTIES OF ERIS within, ponder upon the following:
If you are not sure (no need to be) just go to either Greenwich observatory, or US NAVY site. These pages display the UTC measurement. The minutes and seconds should be the same on your local clock and the UTC; it's only hours that matter. If it's 07:00 by your watch, and the UTC says 12:00, then your time zone is -5, so set the Klock to that.
A freshly compiled Klock, when you download it, will ask you to set the time zone. If it does not, or if you need to change the time zone, run it as
klock.exe -set
to force setting. A screen will pop up to let you set your time zone in the range from -12 to +12. If you think your time zone extends beyond that range, please consult the nearest fnord. (The last statement does not apply to anyone residing outside of Earth.)
NOTE: the Klock in the current version does not support automatic DST (daylight saving time) adjustment. The reason is that I have no idea if all countries enable/disable DST on the same date, or even if all of them do use it (I think not). MIDDLE-OF-NOTE. Windows 95 seems to know when DST comes into effect in my time zone, but I don't, so neither does the Klock. When your country adds or subtracts an hour twice a year, you need to -SET the Klock manually. END-OF-NOTE.
The Klock's primary display uses ugly pseudo-graphics. I'll work on them, but Windows redefines my VGA charset and takes away some of the ASCII chars I would need to use; at this point I don't feel like reprogramming those characters back into the VGA, plus it might or might not work for other graphics cards... So they look ugly for now, sorry about that. Normally the Klock displays the current time in Discordian Time Units as defined above; hit TAB
or BACKSPACE
to flip between Erisian and UTC time display.
Above all, run
KLOCK -?
to see the possibilities, or consult the following chart.
If you don't like the big ugly pseudo-graphics display, run
KLOCK -SMALL
for a plain text-mode display.
If you like -SMALL even less, run
KLOCK -BIG
to get the fancy digits back.
Use
-MONO
and
-COLOR
to force alternate color sets.
These options, when changed, are written directly to the EXE file (I hate INI files) so do not set klock.exe to read-only and do not lzexe it or such, it will complain.
Update: Two new switches added to facilitate conversion from aneristic to Erisian time and back. See docs.
BTW. Source code is kind of available, if anyone wants it, though not included. Conversely, if someone has got (has heard of, has lost, has been seen accompanied by, has never had anything to do with) a graphics package I could slap on Klock to make it look neater, I'll appreciate the misassistance. And what about this JavaScript coding, anyone?
I didn't think so.
At any rate, here are the details of the Klock operation.
"hour":"minute":"second"(flavor),
e.g.
017:04:04(1)
(17 hours, 4 minutes, 4 seconds, Flavor 1)Another note: the space before Flavor is optional.
Everything else is even more optional.
So everyone will understand and everyone will have 017:04:04(1) on their screens at the same precise moment. Well.
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh.
Thank you for your inattention.
sd./
m'Eniac, Lord Fuddlemeister of the Cloned Synapse,
Episkopos, Church of the Whole Shebang & Vapor
General Frenetics, Discorporated, FNORD.
Sweetmorn, Day 29 of Confusion, 3163,
at 000:03:06(1) KET (Klockable Erisian Time)