Don’t forget: we don’t set the clocks back tonight (if you live in a timezone that goes from daylight savings time to standard time). In 2005, Congress extended daylight savings time, so we don’t reset the clocks until next Sunday.
Your computer doesn’t listen to Congress, so it may go kerflooey tonight. You can either bear it for a week or try to do something stupid like reset your kernel yourself or upgrade to OSX Leopard. Personally, I’ll just let things be; in a week it’ll all fix itself, and I have nothing better to do than sit here in my office at home and write. Clocks are for losers who have 9-5 jobs or have to pick up their daughters from school at a certain time.
Oh crap.
Well, OK, maybe I’ll keep an eye on the clock for just this week. I’d rather not sit in The Little Astronomer’s school parking lot for an hour cursing myself have The Little Astronomer sitting at her school for an extra hour waiting for me.
Or Congress. I have no problems understanding that we live on a rotating ball. It’s our divisions of it that confuse the heck outta me.
October 27th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Re: “Well, OK, maybe I’ll keep an eye on the clock for just this week. I’d rather not sit in The Little Astronomer’s school parking lot for an hour cursing myself.”
Actually, I think she’d be waiting an hour for you. Cursing or otherwise.
October 27th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
Oh, man. And I went through the process in my head. Figures.
October 27th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
You know, if you lived in Arizona, you wouldn’t have to do all of this reseting your clocks nonsense.
Just saying.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Come to Europe, Phil. We change our clocktime in two hours from now (it is 1:04 am in Germany) – you would not have those problems
But I’m getting a problem. The next week there is a 7-hour-gap from here to EDT and not the standard 6-hour-gap. I’ll have to remember it when I watch NASA TV (the live coverage of Discovery’s mission is very interesting
)
October 27th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
You know, Fumui, if he lived in Arizona half of the year he would be in synch with California.
just saying.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Ah, daylight savings time. Yet another excuse for coming in an hour late.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Doesn’t matter what time we set our clocks, comet Holmes will still be in the same part of the sky and still completely unobservable from the cloud-ridden area of the UK that I live in.
October 27th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
My dad proposes this idea:
Just change the clocks a half hour back as a compromise, and leave it.
October 27th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
At the school where I teach, a few years ago, some genius decided to turn off the power to our clocks for one hour instead of resetting them. Apparently there is some kind of automatic system to restore the clocks in case of a power failure, which kicked in, and the clocks went back to the old time. Sorta.
Actually they went haywire. Now no two clocks in the school say the same thing. Sometimes the minute hand just starts going the same speed as the second hand. My clock will be right for days, then I’ll look up and it’s wildly wrong.
I have no problem with whatever time system they want to use. Just point me in the right direction and tell me what to do.
BTW, I got to see Comet Holmes a little while ago. Pretty cool. The moon was close by, so conditions could have been better. Actually, I was amazed at how far North the moon is rising.
October 27th, 2007 at 6:28 pm
I hear if you drive really, really, REALLY fast it all becomes relative.
October 27th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
Your computer doesn’t listen to Congress
At last our technology passes the Turing test!
October 27th, 2007 at 6:34 pm
There’s one good thing about this, though… an extra hour of sleep the night the clocks are set back.
October 27th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
The odds are that your cell phone will have the right time, as will as your “atomic” clock (doesn’t everybody have one or two?). You can also get a little program to set your computer’s time from the NIST timeserver.
October 27th, 2007 at 7:04 pm
My brothers are lucky. This year, when November 4th rolls around, they’re not changing their clocks, they’re changing their *time zone*. Or, rather, the county they live in is changing its time zone, from Central to Eastern:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knox_County,_Indiana#Time_Zone_Debate_.2A
October 27th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
Can we please just get rid of DST? Please!
October 27th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
“Reset your kernel”? I’m assuming that was meant for humor’s sake and not intended to reflect reality in the slightest.
Just set your time up after it goes back, and then set the time back again when it’s the right time.
XP and Vista are both ready for the new arrangement. I haven’t bothered to check, but I’d assume any linux equivalent was ready the day the change was announced or shortly thereafter.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
I’m glad the time changed was delayed a week. Now I get an extra hour on my wedding night!! :^)
October 27th, 2007 at 8:14 pm
No need for Mac users to upgrade to OSX Leopard to recognize the shift. If you’ve ran any system update since February 15, 2007 you’re ok.
October 27th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
DrFlimmer,
Since Europe is ahead of the USA, and you’re turning clocks back from 0300 to 0200 (or somesuch), the gap will be FIVE (5) hours.
Or I’m having a major brain-freeze…
October 27th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Daylight Saving Time is a bane. Time is for measurement; there shouldn’t be instances of noon being 23 hours or 25 hours away from the noon of the next day.
October 27th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
@owlbear1
And as an added bonus (at the correct speed, of course), all of the red lights look green!
October 27th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
I read last year that if enough people contacted the Secretary of Energy and complained about the new time change, he had the power to override congress and go back to the First Sunday in April/Last Sunday in October version.
Apparently it was wrong, or enough people don’t care.
October 27th, 2007 at 10:01 pm
@Shawn
Yeah, but try convincing a cop (s)he doesn’t have a privileged frame of reference.
October 27th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
I think people are really not aware of how it works. I think most people like it because they hate it when it gets dark early – they find it depressing. Of course they don’t realize that the day will continue to get shorter and sunsets earlier no matter what the clocks says.
I’d prefer to get rid of Daylight Savings and let the days run their natural course. Safety studies have shows that more accidents happen when we jerk the clocks back and forth because people’s schedules are disrupted.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:00 pm
What’s stupid about upgrading to Leopard? Have you seen Time Machine? It is a wonder.
And Tiger (10.4) is already aware of the change.
Besides, anyone with broadband Internet and a bit of sense has their Mac track off a live time server anyway.
> “You know, if you lived in Arizona, you wouldn’t have to do all of this reseting your clocks nonsense.”
And we wouldn’t have fire or indoor plumbing either.
Hey, I tease Arizona.
> “Or, rather, the county they live in is changing its time zone, from Central to Eastern:”
Don’t they need approval from the Time Lords for that?
October 27th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
You had it right the first time. If you forget to set your clock *back*, you think it’s an hour later than it really is. So if you go to school at 15:00, it’s actually 14:00, and you’ll be the one waiting for an hour.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:44 pm
Speaking of upgrades…
This is a perfect time for Mac users to upgrade to a PC. Things…work…on these machines.
Ill be throttled for this. I am aware of my fate.
Happy not-yet-turn-clock-back-day
October 28th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Monkey, let’s be throttled together.
I have poked my nose out of the apple orchard exactly ONCE. Over the following three months, I reformatted a Dell hard drive five times. Then one afternoon I came home to find my wife sitting on the floor under the desk, weeping. There was the dreaded “blue screen of death,” again–and she was 24 hours away from deadline.
Four hours later, I was back from Fry’s and she was back on track to make deadline. (We had long since learned to back up EVERYTHING. The dandy little zip drive we got for the purpose just plugged into the Mac and–how did Monkey put it? “…work[ed]…”)
I then discovered how many levels of manager you have to climb to get a full refund from the aforementioned merchant.
Seven, for the record.
If you think a computer is a hot rod, and you love to stay out in the garage getting greasy, use Windows.
If you just want to get to work, and maybe take a vacation, it’s Mac or nothing.
Let the bullets fly.
–Jeff
October 28th, 2007 at 12:44 am
A very nice company has a link to the fixes. Microsoft does have fixes for the DST changes but you have to go online to get them; not everyone has their computer wired to the internet. Microsoft also doesn’t support windows 98 and this one does. These programs just are a shortcut method of instituting changes Microsoft has published as rather cumbersome registry changes. (Which are actually published for windows 98 as well, who would have thunk it?)
NT/2000/XP/2003:
http://www.intelliadmin.com/DaylightSavingFix.exe
98/ME
http://www.intelliadmin.com/DaylightSavingFix98.exe
Anyway, I do have a few reasons for liking the new DST times. One is that Halloween will ALWAYS be during DST, making it easier to see ghosts and goblins when you’re driving. I like coming home when there is light, I usually work in the yard or go on a bike ride when I come home a later sunset helps these endevors.
The 3 weeks earlier in the spring actually backfired as an energy saving method, people see it is still light out when they get home, they get in their CAR and drive to the mall. Incidently, this is why it was changed in 1987; to improve business at stores.
Ben Franklin was a big advocate of DST, he thought it was absurd to sleep while the sun was up and use a candle at night. I agree and I like it. I used to subscribe to a sundialist list; those guys despise it, since it makes Sundials incorrect. My only beef–my emerson auto set clock will be wrong forevermore.
As for why just one week in the fall? Seems a bit silly, and silliness (an institution in Washington) belies compromise. Originally there was 3 full weeks extra in the fall (may have been more or less, but 3 weeks is what I recall) in the hallowed halls of congress it ended up getting haggled down to just one week.
October 28th, 2007 at 1:07 am
My problem is – how do you upgrade a 7 months old baby to account for new time settings? He woke up at 5 this morning, thinking it was 6. We tried to reason with him, but to no avail.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:25 am
Yep, no problem with this for Linux here. My watch sets itself to the atomic clock, which also means I am set.
The problem is my bedside alarm clock. It has automatic DST correction, but based on an internal calendar with a backup battery in case of power failure. The problem is that this calendar was programmed without congress in mind, before the change was put into place. This means that I actually have to change the clock twice, once this weekend to override its DST correction and once next weekend to set it to back to DST. It might be time to just get a new clock.
October 28th, 2007 at 6:14 am
@elgarak
You’re right! Shame on me!
October 28th, 2007 at 6:17 am
“losers who have 9-5 jobs”
Real nice, Phil. Can you think of some more ways to alienate your fans?
Don’t you bother to proofread your blog entries, or do you just post them without further thought?
October 28th, 2007 at 6:28 am
Here in Scotland, we always look forward to the clocks going back. Just so it starts to get light at 8:45 in the morning and not 9:45, and the kids don’t get mown down on a regular basis by drivers who can’t see them in the dark going to school. Mind you, it gets dark at 4pm instead of 5…..
October 28th, 2007 at 6:37 am
Mike, does the expression “Tongue-in-cheek” mean anything to you?
If you had included the full sentence: “Clocks are for losers who have 9-5 jobs or have to pick up their daughters from school at a certain time”, you would have noticed that he is in fact a loser himself.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Yes, he is.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:02 am
@Thanny:
No, he set the clock back, but the rest of the country didn’t. So he thinks he still has an hour to go, whereas his daughter is already waiting for him (compare it to setting your watch five minutes ahead in order to be on time).
@Mike: it’s a joke, as Thomas Siefert tried to explain.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Reset your kernel…?!?
I was hopeful for a minute…
I’m a senior level IT architect by trade doing large scale virtual infrastructure designs and deployments (if you don’t know what that is, it takes too long to explain here).
I run Vista Ultimate on my laptop because I have to…
…for now.
I run Linux on my laptop (dual-boot) because I want to. I’ll probably move Windows to a VM once Fedora 8 hits the streets in a couple of weeks.
My peers run Windows and Linux for now, but are all planning to switch to either Fedora or Ubuntu fully shortly (we all just got new laptops, so the timing is good). We’re all fed up with Vista’s …ummm… issues.
I told my sister to buy a MacBook when her laptop died last year. She’s never looked back. Zero problems. She’s upgrading to Leopard next week.
My parents both run Linux (Fedora). No – and I mean zero – issues with compatibility, viruses, etc. My mom can’t remember the last time her system actually crashed. She switched about 4 years ago after a virus managed to get through her (fully updated) AV scanner and destroyed all of her data.
Now, to be fair, all of the above operating systems handled the DST change automatically, but guess which OS seems to have the most issues? Most people I know who are still running Windows (as opposed to Mac or Linux) are doing so because they have to or because they don’t know the alternatives are so much better.
October 28th, 2007 at 9:58 am
Mike you have a few options:
1) Get a sense of humor.
2) Learn to read things in context.
3) Go away.
Any of these will make your life better, I imagine.
And next week, you’ll have an extra hour to do it!
October 28th, 2007 at 10:26 am
I just set the hour ahead again for a week. I’ll set it back next Sunday.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
My main (and only) clock in my house has no minute hand – it’s my “ish” clock. At the moment it’s six-ish, and that’s good enough for me. I don’t bother to reset it for summer time (BST in England), I just deduct an hour, which I don’t need to do from today. I don’t wear a watch either. My motto is “Let time be your slave, not your master.” Believe me, it leads to much less time-related stress in your life!
October 28th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
It does not bother me. because my Mac is set to GMT. Because of NPT it always has the right time. I believe that we should abolish timezones and just use GMT worldwide.
October 28th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Phil…
I used to think you might be the logical successor to Carl Sagan.
I really did.
Not anymore.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
> “My problem is – how do you upgrade a 7 months old baby to account for new time settings?”
Reboot it from the original CD. The doctor did give it to you, right?
And then connect the baby to the Interweb and download the updated drivers from baby.com.
I’m not *even* going to tell you where you have to plug in the cable.
October 29th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Years ago, on a talk radio station I used to listen to, a woman said “Why do they give us an extra hour of daylight in the summer when the days are long anyway? Why don’t they give us the extra hour in the winter when we need it?”
For me, I have to go to school so early it is dark anyway, so the only time it changes anything for me is right after the change, when it is light as I arrive and I feel like I am getting away with something. Of course, sunrise gets later before long, and nothing much gained.
Another benefit for some is that in Maryland the bars are required to close at 2:00 AM. The time changes at 2:00 AM, so they get another hour to drink.
October 29th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Concerning DST: just some more chickens*** to make modern life more ‘convenient.’ I shall heroically shoulder through it with minimal complaint.
Concerning OSes: Shame on you people for bringing up the Great Crusade versus the Maccabees, the Defenestrators, and the Tuxists. Soon this will turn to the Vs. debates. OMG TEH STAR DESTROYER CUD SO PWN TEH ENTERPRIZE!!1!!shift+one.
Anyhoo, GRUB loader died on Lazaruslappy and so I’m going to have to fix that… again… maybe this time use something even more bare-bones than Knoppix. I’m a little tired of OpenOffice wanting to re-register itself every time I open it and taking a good three to five minutes to initialize. And before anyone asks, no, Lazaruslappy is -not- that bad.