Happy New Year

Happy New Year. No one except me stayed up to watch the ball drop (Ginger made it to about 10). And really I didn't either (I was downstairs playing World of Goo on the Wii). I got it using Wii points I got for Christmas. It's very entertaining and a bit addicting. The only bad thing about it is it's kind of short. There's probably a good five or six hours of gameplay, unless you really want to try and obtain the obsessive compulsive disorder records (I didn't even bother). Anyway, I did TiVo the ball drop so the kids and Ginger could see it the next day (and apparently I could also see it if I missed by playing video games too long).

A couple of comments. I think I mentioned this last year. Now I know Dick Clark is a living legend. He's the man. No doubt about it. But it's time to have someone else step in and do the countdown. At one point he was off by several seconds during the countdown (this could be because of that dastardly extra leap second that got added in). Watching Dick now is a bit of a downer because you end up feeling really sorry for the guy. And I have to believe the network isn't trying to bring the party down (I suspect since they have the name brand of Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve they don't know how to continue without him at this point). So instead I switched over to NBC where I got to watch Carson Daly phoning it in on that network. I got the impression the cold played a factor in how enthused he was since they had him standing outside the entire time.

So about that extra leap second, I didn't see the clock go to 23:59:60, so did they adjust for it before the countdown? And how exactly does this work for computers. They all measure time as time since Jan 1 1970. Doesn't this extra second throw everything off? Or is this extra second already accounted for in all the software and this was a planned extra leap second (for some reason I thought the one added this year wasn't on the schedule of every 20 years excluding centuries).