Time comes to an end

[simont]

Hmmm. This morning I looked at my watch and discovered that it was reading a completely random time of day. It's also lost its ability to sync with the MSF radio signal from Rugby, and for good measure it's forgotten its settings too (particularly the vital ‘don't go beep all the time’).

Now those could all be consequences of a low battery, possibly with a side order of MSF being harder to hear in Dorset (where I'm currently visiting Dad) than it is in Cambridge.

But on this day of all days, perhaps there's an alternative explanation. Time really has come to an end, and that's why my watch isn't telling it any more!

Comments

[holdthesky]

Maybe it uses Mayan internally and then has a massive compatibility layer? We'd probably do the same for the Mayans after all!

[simont]

Ah, a particularly special Y2K / Y2038 / etc sort of problem? Could be :-)

(I think the previous best I'd seen was a Y1997 problem: a couple of years ago I used BeebEm to resurrect all the programs I'd written for BBC Masters and Econet at school, and discovered that the file server protocol's time format had had a 4-bit year field with an epoch of 1981. Oops. But it turned out that since the same protocol was reused by RISC OS, Acorn had updated it to turn a few unused bits into an extension of the year field, so I was able to fix that bug in my old programs and get them working again :-)

[huggyrei.livejournal.com]

Maybe time did come to and end, and then a bunch of people saved us all. After all, if time had stopped moving, we wouldn't really have noticed.

[samholloway.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if you know that the 'Rugby MSF' signal is no longer transmitted from Rugby; it's now from Anthorn in Cumbria. So from Dorset you're definitely a way away!

[simont]

No, I didn't know that! It was Rugby the last time I looked :-)