No, it's not really about me it's about the watch. This Christmas, Christine got me a watch, a very nice one in fact, a skeleton faced automatic movement, batteries not included, or needed. But as I am a little particular about my timepieces. I just had to get the "right" one. Yes, watches are becoming redundant now that everyone has a cell phone that actually always keeps the time. Or just look around and the time is on your laptop, on the wall, on your microwave and stove, on your receipts, even on those old VCR things when they aren't blinking 12:00. Yes, you'll notice when our power goes out. Well, it's all digital, and working in tech, I sometimes prefer something different, less technical or at least something that looks less technical. Okay, I will admit to having a calculator watch in high school, but I've never know how to use a slide rule, punch cards, or a reverse polish notation calculator. Yes, back to the watch-hunt. If are looking into something more than the basic watch, a good place is mechanical watches, the type people owned before the ubiquitous quartz watch. Either wound by hand or automatically wound by mechanisms in the watch that use the movement of your arm. They are a minority, given that battery power quartz movements are more accurate and so much less expensive. Yet some they have interesting features, or in watch-speak, complications, not normally many watches. For example some have like retrograde hands, where the hands spring back after reaching the end of an arc indicating the time, day, or date. Or some watches, called jump hours, have spinning discs to indicate the hour and/or minute. Although, mechanical watches were my first choice, Christine had already given me a very nice one the year we got married, and I was looking for another daily wear watch.
Three watch brands struck my fancy, Nixon, Toyko flash, and Nooka, although I also found THE watch from Urwerk, via the Watchismo blog, both incredible and impossibly expensive. The Nixon timepieces have a nice retro-looking, the one I like most had a spinning dial design. Toyko flashes are among the most interesting, indicting hours with blinking lights, movement or leds. You just have to see them to see why the are unique. The model I liked there, called the Scope, was a grid with one side in hour the other minutes in 5 minute increments, and the hands were just vertical and horizontal lines, with the time where the two intersected. The last maker Nooka also spun time in it's own fashion. A couple of its watch are sold at the MoMa store. Hours are counted typically, maybe in dots or bars, as are minutes. There are 60 pixels in the lcd screen, side, by side. When viewed together, the model I chose with a little input from Christine, the Zen, has four bars across stacked, 2 bars for hours, each bar six hours across, one bar for minutes, and one bar for seconds. Looking forward to having some time on my hands.
