Digital Workshop

Okay all you really clever folk, lets see if you can help me with this one.
I need to be able to keep track of the time that a student has actually been using a production. When the user logs out to take a break I need to save this piece of data to a 8 character text field (in a remote database). On relaunching the publication I need the data to be retrieved and the 'clock' to be updated and then started again from that point.
I am already saving and retrieving the data using the Post Web Data function, and I can turn the clock output into a text string using
MyArray=CLOCK.split(":");
PASSTIME=MyArray[0]+MyArray[1]+MyArray[2]
However, when I retrieve the string and convert it into three groups of numbers (hours,minutes,seconds) I cannot work out how to update the clock function with these variables.
I even thought of using the PUBLICATION_TIME variable but cannot seem to start that from a given number.
Any Ideas?
Andy Thompson.

The attached example is a very simple way to do this.

In the attached example there is a ticker on the page set to tick every second. If a varaible called PAUSE is set to 1, the timer stops incrementing.

On the page is a Pause button that set the variable PAUSE to 1 and a Re-Start button that set the Variable PAUSE to 1.

Hope this helps