As we are all counting down to welcome in 2009, we should be reminded to wait just a second, to stop wishing our lives away.

At 7pm Eastern time (midnight UTC), the official international time-keeping standards body inserted a “leap second” into the normal stream of ordinary seconds.

This is done periodically to keep our standard clocks (UTC) in sync with “mean solar time”, which is based on the Earth’s position and rotation. If we did not do that, then Earth-related events such as midnight and noon would gradually shift to different times of the day (likewise, without leap days, the equinoxes and solstices would gradually shift through the year).

At home, I could witness this historic event in the logs of my Linux-based server, bender.

Dec 31 18:59:59 Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC

How did YOU spend YOUR leap second?