Beat it

So today was Drew's b-day and a bunch of us met up at Yard House in the Spectrum to celebrate with him. The Yard House is a pretty sweet restaurant/bar that has over 150 beers on tap (count them, I know you won't) where you can get beer by the yard in 3-foot tall glasses. Actually, I think they stopped serving full yards because the glasses kept getting broken. They were quite difficult to wield... people often look like one of those guys wearing lederhosen playing an alpenhorn in a Ricola commercial. WEIRD... that's the second time tonight that lederhosen has come up. Nevertheless, it was a fun group of people to chat and hang with.

I didn't take any photos from tonight, but I do have this pic from Drew's b-day waaay back in 2003 when I was still new and didn't know Bj's would be one of my favorite restaurants and a pizookie would be one of my favorite desserts. Those were fun times. I had to include Drew in my blog tonight because he was mocking the blogosphere. And because it's his birthday.
Cheers!

The other reason for my post tonight is because the subject of Swatch Beats was brought up again (thanks Tammy) and it seems that no one believes that such a thing really exists! Back in 1998, Swatch came up with this brilliant idea (or so they thought) for a new way to keep time. They called it Swatch Internet Time and the time was kept in Swatch Beats. Everyone on the planet was on the same time and there were no time zones. Each day was comprised of 1000 Swatch Beats, with each beat equalling 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. I quickly found that's a bitch to compute all the time. The purpose was to bring everyone together and make it easier to set times to chat or play games on the internet because you could just meet at a certain Swatch Beat time and not be burdened with having to add or subtract hours based on time zones (which everyone figured out wasn't such a chore afterall). Time was written as "@259" meaning "at 259 swatchbeats after midnight". But, the conversion got really confusing, even though the whole point was to simplfy time.

When I was a sophomore in college, I totally thought this was going to be the new 'thing', so I had a Swatch Internet Time application on my computer that displayed the time and also a watch with Swatch Beats. Yeah that did me a lot of good. First of all, it never caught on. Imagine that. Secondly, it never caught on. You couldn't depend on telling your study buddies to meet up @792 and really expect them to show up. Nope, not even at a nerdy school like UMR.

If you want try to restart the revolution, you can download the time application for your computer here: click right here. Good luck with that.