Happy Leap Day!

Today is unique in that February 29th only comes around once every 4 years. While you don't really get an extra day to get stuff done, it is a fairly unique day and so you want to do something special to mark it. Writing in my blog is always nice but something I have done before. As I mentioned yesterday, I am working on my taxes and think it would be great to have a filing date of February 29th and so that is my goal this evening. I am almost done and so it is a real possibility.

So what unique thing are you going to do with this extra day in the calendar? Hopefully something worthwhile and memorable.

Leap Day

Leap Day is one of those events that happens once every 4 years and just happens to be today. It is necessary to keep the calendar from getting out of sync. Of course it would be convenient if every year had the same number of days, but that's not how the universe works.

A few years ago, I had a co-worker propose that we were off on the number of days during the year. He had noticed that the seasons seemed to be starting later and later. I had had a similar thought before and ran through the mental exercise. I realized that while seasons were directly effected by the rotation of the earth around the sun, we really use the length of day to calculate how long this voyage takes. I pointed that out to my co-worker and he agreed with my logic.

Computers are kind of like the earth. It would be nice if they all used uniform time units to represent a day. Unfortunately that is impossible, simply because of tiny differences in how computer clocks are made. So that means that every once an a while you might want to resync your computer's clock with a trusted time reference. What better day than Leap Day to make that adjustment? After all, sometimes it is very important that your computer has the right time.