Clock drift

For as long as I’ve owned my laptop, I’ve had problems with the clock being slow. It’s not some silly “my clock is set to a time five minutes in the past and I can’t fix it” kind of thing, I mean the clock really runs slow.

For example, when I start work in the morning one of the first things I do is

$ sudo rdate -s time-b.nist.gov

in order to sync my clock. Around 11:00 AM Solveig might ask me if I’m hungry and if I want some lunch. This makes me think that it’s too early for lunch until it dawns on me that my clock has fallen behind. Once more I

$ sudo rdate -s time-b.nist.gov

and I realize that the actual time is something like 1:30 PM. Four hours whent by, but my computer thought that only two hours had passed.

Later in the afternoon I’ll be unable to believe how long the day is dragging on. I’ll stare at the clock thinking “surely it can’t be only 3:30, it feels like I’ve put in at least six hours since lunch!” Then I realize (indeed, I hope) that my clock has been slow again. So I

$ sudo rdate -s time-b.nist.gov

and all of a sudden it’s 4:30 PM (not the six hours I’d assumed, but still an appreciable distance). When my computer tells me another ten minutes have passed, I’ll

$ sudo rdate -s time-b.nist.gov

and I’ll see that in the real world 17 minutes have passed. Often the end of the day is a game between me and my computer, with the computer trying to get me to unwittingly work past 5:00 PM, while I try to fix my clock at what I hope will turn out to be exactly 5:00 PM. So far the computer has proved to be more adept at this game than I am.

Needless to say this little problem wreak certain a sort of havoc on my life. Specifically it makes me always late. Late to join conference calls, late for lunch dates, late to meet Solveig when I promised not to be late. Perhaps this is why she gave me a watch for Christmas.

I know, I could simply add rdate to my crontab (or even run ntpd to really do the job right), but I just can’t brind myself to do it. It feels too much like treating the symptom, not the problem. I want to be aware of the problem until it’s really fixed, not just hide it behind some clever scripts. As things stand so far, it seems that I’ll remain acutely aware of the problem for some time to come.