Synchronize your watches

Remember all those WW2 commando epics, and right before the big mission they all synchronize their watches? Well, I dare you to do that in a digital world. The machine era guys tried to make things easy to work. Watches were great. Assuming you wound it up and kept it attached to your wrist, it's a snap. Setting it is the easiest thing in the world. Find the approximate time. Pull the dial out and twist everything to the right time. Push in when Captain Mallory says "mark." The BBC World Service even still has their tones for setting your watch at the top and bottom of every hour. "Bip,bip, bip, bip, bip, bip, BEEP" and push in the knob. You are on to the second.
There is, however, no way to do this in the digital era. Just among devices I have at hand:

• Entry into edit modes:
• Changing the time could be forward-only, or forward and backwards; it could go on its own speed (maybe with two speeds) or each increment is a button push; the whole time could be as one, or hours and minutes could each have their own buttons; most have key repeat, but how much and how fast?

But none of them have an explicit exit mode. They time out, eventually, sometime. When does the time entered take effect? It depends. And you can't tell. So there's no good way to set time to the second. This makes me sad.

More non-magic

Check out this article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7867091.stm This is the teaser on the RSS feed, and the article is not much better:

Mobiles connect across the waves Merchant ship crews will soon be able to ditch satellite phones and make calls to home using their own mobiles.

How very cool! No, wait. That's not possible. They eventually admit the satcoms are still there, and there's a picocell that just gathers all the mobile signals and sends them up the normal way. I don't think it serves anyone well to sell every service as total magic. Just yesterday my cruise control went out. In the middle of driving it disengaged and wouldn't come back on. It does work again now that it's been power cycled, but since it's so computerized, it's just magic to me. I was able to get an explanation of what probably happened from a friend who programs robots for factories for a living. He's never seen the car, but he knows /in principle/ how PLCs (programmable logic controllers) work, and how they like to fail. He's probably right. Obscuring technology can be great and I do it all the time. The user doesn't need to be burdened with every detail. But it seems like there should be some middle ground where you can dive into things if you need to, and you have a basic understanding so you know which box to kick or who to complain to if a system fails. I fear we're moving more and more to a world where no one will be able to even understand what is broken, much less get anything fixed when it does break.