Looking back on this is hilarious... So all this program does is write out a simple script with console commands that could be executed in Half-Life/Counter-Strike.
In-game, you bind a key to execute this script and it tells you the current time and the time left on the current map.
I laughing trying to think, "How did I decide I needed this?" Ok, so you couldn't see the current time from within the game, and alt-tabbing would either take forever or break the game... I guess I might not have had a clock in my room after I started using my computer as an alarm, whenever that was... though I was pretty sure these were back int the days where I wore a watch continuously...
Funny, but the program worked, and I used it for some time.
Perhaps even funnier was the utility HLtxt, which I tried to write afterwards. It is important to note that my playstyle and level of skill in Counter-Strike resulted in a lot of time dead between rounds, and as mentioned, these were the days when alt-tabbing broke the game or was prohibbitively slow (also no dual monitors).
So the idea was that HLtxt was a monitoring program that would let you read (or possibly even write) content from outside the game by executing config files dynamically generated by the program. Then I could read other things, or write papers for school... while I was dead in CS. For example, it was populated with the first chapter of Alice in Wonderland by default, and you could bind a key to show the current line of the text and advance to the next. I think I got the read-mode to work, but I don't remember ever actually using this.