I need another clock to take care of, like I need my C-drive to crash. Yet, I bo ught one anyway--a Super Clock. This, however, is a software clock and it's call ed: "Atomic Clock", a product of Parsons Industries. Now, this clock is the daug hter of all clocks. At my bidding, she dials into the mother of all clocks, the atom-driven observatory clock in Boulder, Colorado to fetch the absolutely, posi tively accurate time which she then she plugs it into my PC system's clock. Is t hat cool or what?

At a recent General meeting of the TCS, the sales guy from Parsons demo-ed this and several other products. Well, as you can imagine, this time-nut got hooked. I figured you can't go wrong for nineteen bucks--so I called them up and bought two of them (one for a gift) plus their product called "Address Book", which I'll review one of these days. Besides we got a fantastic discount off that $19. So I figured I can always throw it out if it's too complicated for me to run.

Two days later the stuff showed up in my mailbox. The software came on a 3.5" floppy, accompanied by a well-designed manual. I usually don't read manuals, but being somewhat of a tech writer, I couldn't help but scrutinize and appreciate the layout and such. Well, anyway, I accidentally read some of the details and it scared the hell out of me. As is my pet-peeve-policy, I ignored all that verbiage, stuck the floppy in the slot and ran the setup.

By gosh, a neat little startup screen appeared, asking me some civilized questions and then proceeded to load the stuff into the directory which I had authorized it to use. The thing was smart enough to know that there are people like me in the real world who are not interested in playing tekkie games. Did I want to tell it where my modem was located? Surely you jest! So it found it by itself. And on it went happily plugging in a bunch of defaults.

Suffice it to say, the thing came up like clockwork(sorry about that). I now have access to the big Mother anytime I feel the urge to do so. Not only will little Miss A-clock give me the exact Tulsa time, but if I want to call my brother-in-law in Germany, it'll tell me his time--and it keeps track of whether one or th e other of us runs on daylight savings time. Recently, while I was working on the mainframe from home, I desperately needed a Julian date, Miss A will give it to me now. If I want to know the current phase of the moon, which interests me occasionally, I but need to ask.

Here's another feature that tops them all! Miss A keeps a log of each of her chats with Mother. After two contacts, she calculates the discrepancy in my PC clock and--listen to this--updates it at each bootup based on the discrepancy calculation. Each further check with Mother tightens up the discrepancy calculation, so that a call to Mother once or twice a year would eventually suffice to remain true to "real time".

Miss A has several other nifty features hidden in her repertoire of tricks that I have yet to explore. I'm pleased with what she's shown me so far. If you want her, she'll come to your PC too. Call her up at 800.223.6925 or catch her on the WWW at www.parsonstech.com.

Hey it's time to quit this diatribe.

Bye.

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