Flashes of Panic

When I was researching my uptime rollover issue, I found several discussions which suggested that uptime is actually measured, at the kernel level, in units known (I am not making this up) as “jiffies.”

Jiffy turns out to have several definitions, but in the case of uptime it is .01 second, a “tick” of the computer clock. (It is stored in a thirty-two bit register, which means it will count to 2³² or 4,294,967,295 jiffies, which is ~42,949,672 seconds, ~715,828 minutes, ~11,930 hours, or ~497 days… it makes sense now.)

The idea of the “jiffy” as a standard unit of measure tickles me. In this vein, I’ve decided to give up taking mass measurements in pounds. I’m now measuring only how much I vary from an arbitrary “marathon fitness” milestone, using cats as my unit of measure. Since the cat’s mass varies somewhat, the number is pretty fluid, but this is not a value which can be measured with great precision in any case. (It can be measured with depressing accuracy, but precision and accuracy are not the same thing.)

Right now I’m up by about 1.2 cats. Once I get my weekly mileage back where it should be, I should be able to trim much of that in a jiffy.

Now Playing: Wake from Yellow No.5 [EP] by Heatmiser