My IT department sent out an email about DST this weekend. In there were instructions on how to verify that your PC has received the patches.
One of the statements in the email I found funny…
“If, for example, your meeting should occur at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, it will now show as 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday. This would indicate your Outlook has been correctly patched. “
So this would lead me to believe that because we went to DST, then all my meetings get pushed by an hour.
HEH.
I don’t fully understand why we use DST to begin with. I understand the main purpose of Daylight Saving Time (called “Summer Time” in many places in the world) is to make better use of daylight. We change our clocks during the summer months to move an hour of daylight from the morning to the evening. Sounds good enough. I don’t see why I have to change my clock to make better use of my time. I understand the argument that we save on energy usage, but it still all seems silly to me.
DST patching
LOL, yeah, that’s a confusing instruction. What were they thinking?
I have spent way too much time over the past few months patching and verifying systems where I work. The Energy Policy mandate on moving DST has resulted in somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 worth of work from one individual. Multiply that by the number of IT guys handling the same thing around the world, and I think we spent more on fixing various systems to accommodate the new DST schedule than we’re gonna save in energy.
A history of daylight saving time is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
Apparently the US tried year-round Daylight Saving Time from 1968 to 1971, but it was immensely unpopular in the northern states. Interestingly, there is little evidence the 2007 change will diminish energy consumption. If you walk to a bus stop or work, maybe you should arrange to take the day after the DST change off: the day after the shift corresponds with a large rise in traffic fatalities, particularly with pedestrians.
What makes me laugh is that my Windows PC correctly accounted for DST, and then the next time it connected to the Internet to the time server it picked during setup, it kicked back to standard time. I’m still not sure how to fix that other than to disable the Internet Time feature of my Windows laptop.
IMHO, our DST implementation is an attempt to enforce a virtue — “early to bed and early to rise” — on the population by mandate, with nominal energy gains used as the bait to get us to go along with it. It almost makes me want to move to Arizona, the thing irritates me so much.
And on that note, apparently my server is not yet honoring DST. I can see that the operating system is patched, but apparently I need to apply a PHP patch now…
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Matthew P. Barnson
Chaos
Here is one of the stories I found at http://webexhibits.org/daylightsaving/k.html .
Chaos of Non-Uniform DST
Widespread confusion was created during the 1950s and 1960s when each U.S. locality could start and end Daylight Saving Time as it desired. One year, 23 different pairs of DST start and end dates were used in Iowa alone. For exactly five weeks each year, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were not on the same time as Washington D.C., Cleveland, or Baltimore—but Chicago was. And, on one Ohio to West Virginia bus route, passengers had to change their watches seven times in 35 miles! The situation led to millions of dollars in costs to several industries, especially those involving transportation and communications. Extra railroad timetables alone cost the today’s equivalent of over $12 million per year.