Sorry about the “Big” in the title, yes, it is out of place, but I thought ABCDE would look pretty.

Thanks to KDE and its plasmoids, I have rediscovered analog clocks this week – the last time I checked (pun intended), I was using a digital clock all the time (pun not intended – seriously), but all that changed after I used the analog clock in KDE4 (featured in the picture here) this week. It’s not that the clock is pretty (which it is) but that I have realized that a digital clock only shows you an instance in time, where as an analog clock has a lot more information packed into it.

Right now, it is 12:51AM in the digital clock (since I’m on windows), but those numbers themselves don’t tell me much, besides the fact that it is 12:51AM. An analog clock, on the other hand (uh, sorry) not only tells me that it is 12:51AM, which is almost 11/12th of an hour after midnight, it also makes me think remember the recent past, the dinner I had at 10PM, the ex-student that I met after 6 years at 7PM while coming back home from a meeting at 5PM, all the way back to 8AM, when I woke up (I’m still proud about waking up at 8AM after many many months). It also shows me the time I can allow myself to write this post (10 minutes) before I must go to sleep (for 7 hours) so that I can wake up at 8AM again. I don’t know about you, but with a digital clock, I had to consciously think about all of this after looking at the time – but looking at the analog clock triggers these thoughts in the back my mind. A digital clock never did that!

So… no more digital clocks for me, I’m installing a windows widget for an analog clock (a digital analog clock would be an oxymoron) when I wake up (at 8AM).

In another related incident, tonight, my son’s bedtime (Barney) story featured Mrs. Goldfinch, who looked up the name of a multi-colored egg in books (it was a “dream-maker” egg), and my son’s immediate query was, “Why didn’t she look it up on Google?”.

We need a new set of books, and it is a good time to enter the children’s book market. Any takers?