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This week, we end the year by making it a little longer and visit Web sites that take notice of that extra time.

Don't know if you noticed, but the Earth is slowing down. It just isn't rotating on its axis as quickly as it has in the past. As a result, the atomic clocks that our timekeepers use to keep time need to be adjusted occasionally to stay in synch with the Earth's rotation. Accordingly, on New Year's Eve, "Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) will be retarded by 1.0s so that the sequence of dates of the UTC markers will be:

"2005 December 31 23h 59m 59s
"2005 December 31 23h 59m 60s
"2006 January 01 0h 0m 0s"

In other words, an extra second, the "leap second," will be inserted just before midnight UTC this New Year's. Which brings us to the LeapSecond Home Page of Tom Van Baak.

The LeapSecond Home Page is the result of one man's quest witness time retard by one second.

Ten years ago, Tom wanted to build an LED digital analog clock that would be accurate to better than one second per year, so he would have the fun of adjusting it when a leap second occurred. "This simple goal resulted in a most interesting journey into electronics, horology, astronomy, test equipment, quartz oscillators, rubidium and cesium atomic clocks, hydrogen masers, frequency counters and phase comparators, GPS, Loran C, GOES, and WWV / WWVB radio receivers." Tom's Web site is dedicated to precise time and frequency and it contains an amazing array of information in this realm.

The folks who populate the precise time and frequency realm affectionately call each other "time-nuts." Since time and frequency are an integral part of ham radio, some time-nuts are also ham radio-nuts. One, in particular, John Ackermann, N8UR, hosts and administers the time-nuts mailing list, where the time-nuts discuss precise time and frequency measurement and related topics. Besides tending to the time-nuts mailing list, John also has an interesting Web site, American Febo Enterprises, with a page dedicated to time and frequency measurement.

Until next year, keep on surfin'.

Editor's note: Always short on time, Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, looks forward to a little extra time on this New Year's Eve. Discuss your favorite time or other cool stuff with Stan by e-mailing him or adding comments to his blog.

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