[time-nuts] So, how did you spend your leapsecond?

[Dave Martindale]

I was invited to dinner with friends, so I took some stuff with me.  Before
dinner, I explained the concept of "leap second" to the hosts' 8-year old
daughter.  She understood leap years already, and I think she understood
the leap second explanation too.

As the appointed time (8 PM here, in EDT land):

- An Apple iPhone running Emerald Time displayed 19:59:60 flawlessly.

- I tried to use a web browser on an iPad to display www.time.gov.  That
was a dismal failure, probably because the time.gov web page uses Flash for
its counting clock, and Apple doesn't support Flash.  So the page was
there, but there was no clock.

- But my host had his PC laptop out, he was displaying www.time.gov too,
and it did show 19:59:60.  So we got to see it there.

- My Casio WaveCeptor watch, which had synced successfully with Fort
Collins at midnight this morning, did nothing.  So it's now running 1
second fast.  It will probably reset itself overnight, but that means it's
displaying the wrong time for 4 hours or more.  Tsk tsk.

However, I didn't bring a video camera, so I have no images of any of this.
 My hosts had never seen a leap second before, and they thought it was neat.

     Dave

PS: I looked up "leap second" on Wikipedia one hour after the event, and
someone had already updated the photo to show the most recent leap second
from the NIST page (not that it's likely to be much different from the
previous time).