I hope you know that messages to the server can take more than a minute to show up on other people's clients. If the network is really busy, badly managed or under attack, server lag can go way up. I can tell you that trying to play on a trivia chan on such a network is not fun: you only see the question after the time to answer it is up
The only decent way to get an accurate time reading is using NTP (network time protocol). There are free clients around, it's even built into Windows XP, but it only checks every 5 days or so by default, so on my computer with a 2 sec/hour drift it's really not useful...
