Thank you Mel,
I am incorporating your olympic timer in my medicine scheduler project I used some code snippets from les Johnson's book "experimenting with picbasic" I also read your thread with bits,byte, and arrray handling and found it intuitive!!!
I am still fixing my keypad routine to scan and output to LCD like a mobile fone does(",) I am trying to find a lcd menu routine for my display I will post it later on a new thread

thanks again
ryan