In which it's surmised that there might be something to keeping things simple...
Yesterday, August 17th, something unexpected happened.
The digital clock in my Honda CRV started showing the correct time again.
Big deal?
Not in the scheme of things, but it’s been a while since it was last performing as it should…
…December 31st 2021 in fact.
To be fair it was the only element of the integrated sat/nav, audio, telephone and clock system that hadn’t been working.
Apparently, the bit of the computer responsible for the time was flummoxed by the transition into 2022…a sort of millennium bug with a 22 handicap if you will…
There have been a number of technical explanations posted on the internet relating to the fault.
Here’s one…
'Global Positioning Systems measure time from an epoch, or a specific starting point used to calculate time.
The date is broadcasted including a number representing the week, coded in 10 binary digits.
These digits count from 0 to 1023 then roll over on week 1024. GPS weeks first started on January 6, 1980 before first zeroing out on midnight August 21, 1999. It happened again April 6, 2019. The next happens in 2038.
If software isn’t coded to account for the rollover, weird stuff can happen, like a calendar going back exactly 1024 weeks.
Honda’s navigation systems might be programmed so that the start of their week counter is a date 19.6 years in the past, but not in-line with GPS epoch...'
Well that's no doubt what you were thinking.
But in my non-scientific brain I am thinking this.
The clock woke up yesterday and remembered that it was a clock.
And with but one function to perform. Telling the time.
The long-awaited promise of a technical fix from the boffins at Honda wasn’t the solution after all.
In fact it turns out there never was one...the programming error meant that there was nothing wrong with the clock.
Ironically, all it needed to correct itself was...time.
And isn’t golf a bit like that?
We can all get bound up in the complexities of the 'technical' and intricacies of the 'theoretical' when it comes to our game.
There’s no shortage of rationale and context to help us make sense of a poor showing.
And like the clock in my Honda, we can go along for months with no expectation of performance.
But maybe we’ve just got to remind ourselves that playing golf, like a clock telling time, is really a simple proposition.
As Arnold Palmer' said:
'Hit it hard, go find it, and hit it hard again’.
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