<rant>
The trouble with Swatch time is that nobody uses beats in real-life, and most likely never will. If I find out that something is happening in 5 minutes that immediately makes sense to me and in my mind I can comprehend that length of time. However if someone says something will happen in 12 beats from now I'm left wondering how long that is, and whether that time has passed while I was sitting here thinking about it. Just doing the calculations means converting beats to seconds (60 * 60 * 1024 / 1000) - 86.4secs/beat, multiplying that by the number of beats (86.4 * 12) - 1036.8, and then converting those seconds into a meaningful time (1036.8 / 60 mins, 1036.8 % 60 secs) - 17mins, 17secs. Thank God for $calc and $duration because if I didn't already know there were 86400 seconds in a day I wouldn't have even been able to do a single one of those steps in my head . Well I could have eventually, but maybe not within 17 minutes and 17 seconds.
And what does this have to do with having a $swatch identifier in mIRC? Nothing and everything. Nothing in the sense that this entire post is based on my personal feelings on the whole fiasco. Everything in the sense that hopefully other people feel the same way that I do - that 'Internet Time' is little more than hype and a gimmick on Swatch's part, and that such things shouldn't be given the time of day (no pun intended) when it comes to serious methods of retrieving and calculating time.
</rant>
