I like clocks. I'm not sure why, especially in light of the fact that, like most people in my age group, I find analogue clocks difficult to read (more on this someday). But I just dig clocks.

So, if you hang out on the internet, you have to deal with time zones other than the one you live in a lot. What's interesting is that Microsoft has no real sense of this. This led to a great fiasco when, at a place I was working, the secretary tried to use Outlook to schedule meetings between people at the office (In Baltimore) and people in California, which were to take place in Las Vegas. So, the secretary would type in "Meeting at 2 PM", and Outlook would "helpfully" tell the person in California that the meeting was at 10 AM. And, of course, on the east coast, the meeting would really be at 5. And there was no way to convince Outlook to *not* do this. Of course, everyone says "Well, you want to schedule it for 5, because that's what time it will be where this computer is." But (a) No one works like that, and (b) it would show up in the Californian's schedule as 1 PM, which isn't what he wanted either.

Anyway, back to reality. I deal regularly with websites who schedule events on their own local clock, or on GMT. Now, honestly, in my day to day life, there is no reason I need to know what the current time is GMT, so, no, you arrogant geeks, I am not going to just set my own personal clock to GMT and insist that everyone I do business with act the same. So I found myself wanting a multi-time zone clock. Now, personally, I wouldn't mind having a bunch of clocks on the wall set to different times, the way they used to in news rooms (and probably still do, but they keep them off camera now), but even I realize that's a little geeky.

There are numerous programs on the interweb that can do this, but I really wanted something small and unobtrusive that wouldn't take up any real estate when I wasn't using it, that would be available at a moment's notice, and that wouldn't leave me spending six hours resetting all the clocks after a power failure (this is the downside to my really digging clocks),

Suddenly, I remembered something important: I am a programmer. Why not just write my own?

And so I did. This is beta software, and my goal was to go from 0 to working as quickly as possible, so there may be things I haven't accounted for, but it does seem to work. Check it out: TimeMan.

Here's how it works: Run the program, and a little clock will appear in your system tray. When clicked, a balloon will pop up for several seconds, displaying the current time in UTC, Eastern, Central, and Pacific (Some day, I'll enhance it to display the time zones of your choosing, but for right now, it displays the ones that I personally find useful). To kill it, right click the icon (this will make the balloon pop up too, because I was in a hurry) and select 'Close'. You can stick a shortcut in your Startup folder to automate the whole thing..

Anyway, all I ask for the use of it is that you drop me a line saying what you think. It does require the .NET framework 2.0, because making it work without it was more effort than I wanted to put in for this. In any case, enjoy.

Updated....
If you get an error when trying to run TimeMan to the tune of "couldn't find mscoree.dll", it means you need to download the .NET runtime stuff. You can get it here: Get the .NET Framework.