Time for annother project

My Mom had noted that I seem to have and interest in designing and making digital clocks just like my Dad did. He built several clocks that we still use and has several skeletons of ones that were never finished. The ones that did get finished are really cool. All of the ones that work use alphanumeric LED dot displays. The one in his bedroom has scrolls the numbers like an old pinball machine when they change, dims automatically when it gets dark, Displays the date, Adjusts for leap-years, and it also used to adjust to DST (Until some weirdos changed it.) As if that isn't enough, it automatically turns on the electric blanket at a certain time, but only if it's below a certain temperature.
The one in our family room has 8 display segments instead of the 4 in the bedroom. It also scrolls the date every 10 seconds like the other one, but it doesn't have any buttons. There is a phone cable coming out the back from which it gets the time and power from the master clock in the bedroom. The clock that used to sit in the basement was like the one in the family room except it would scroll announcements like "Merry Christmas!" on Christmas day or "Don't Be A Fool!" on April 1. *sigh* I had better make my clock really cool if it's going to compete with the others.
At first I thought that I would use some of the VFD displays I found and make a "Frankenclock" which would display the time in binary, ternary, hex, Florence time, octal, Swatch beats, decimal, metric, Base64 or any other crazy system I cam across. This "Frankenclock" would be insanely geeky but also insanely hard to program. The amount of clocks/timers needed would probably be beyond the specs of most microprocessors. I could see I needed something a bit simpler.
Through my studies in Chemistry and Physics I have developed a dislike for the English measurement system. The main problem I have with it is that the units make no sense. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the system. Us Americans are used to the craziness but what would think if someone said, "My car goes 78 leagues to the hogshead"? You'd probably say, "You're cracked!" and rightly so. Two time systems have caught my attention as being the best clock to build; Metric and Hex time. Metric is simple because you could do it with just counter chips as the time is written something like this: 27388.4589 where the 27388 is the days since 0AD or some other date, 4 is the the hour (out of 10) and and 589 would be 58.9 metric seconds. There are 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour and 100 seconds in a minute. Very intuitive.
With Hex time, there are 16 hours in a day because the hex system goes 123456789abcdef. I'm not really sure how the minutes and seconds work. The Hex system is more complicated and requires learning a whole new number system. Definitely geekier than the metric clock, but since my expertise in logic, counters, programming and hexadecimal are quite limited at the moment, I will be building a metric clock. I do plan to make a hex clock next though.