WOW, THAT was annoying.  So in order to do a current and man future projects...I decided I should "learn" how to use the AVR timers.  But the datasheets are kind of...long winded.  I mean they're REALLY long.  Consider this, the 16bit timer I was looking at has four 16bit registers.  One's the timer it's self, that's a no-brainer.  It counts.  The other 16bit registers just hold values that are used to compare to that counter.  That's pretty straight forward too.  Next, there's a byte that holds the interrupt flags that make the processor do something special when say... the timer equals one of the counters...AND, a "mask" byte that's used to turn on/off the processor's attention to those flags.  By the way, the interrupt/mask take up 2 pages in the datasheet.

Now, that leaves two 8bit (well, maybe they're considered a single 16bit).  The last two bytes worth of data tell the timer how to operate.  Now as I mentioned, there are two pages in the datasheets that explain the interrupt registers...but the two timer control registers take 28 PAGES!  It's so long winded that you actually get lost.  Did a politician write this section or something?  A lawyer?  The guy from that old Animaniacs episode where Yacko, Wacko and Dot couldn't shake off the guy talking about Bob Barker eating a baloney and cheese sandwich?  Oh well, that's behind me, once I recover from the ordeal of actually using the registers I can get back to getting the microcontroller to actually do something.