February 8, 2007
Dear Everyone:
Oh, my God! The government’s really done it this time.
I’m not talking about the Shrub Administration hijacking the terrorist attacks of September 11th, and adding imaginary Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) as an excuse to invade an oil-rich country just for the fun of it. Nor am I talking about the recent decision (by “The Decider”) to send even more troops into the middle of the (easily-predicted) civil war that resulted from that ill-advised invasion.
No, I’m talking about something much closer to home. I’m talking about Daylight Saving Time (DST). I just found out about this today, and I’m willing to bet that you haven’t heard about it at all yet. Daylight Saving Time is changing.
Up until now, DST started on the first Sunday in April and ended on the last Sunday in October. But no more. As a result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Daylight Saving Time will begin on the second Sunday in March and continue until the first Sunday in November.
Now you’re probably thinking, “Big deal. Three more weeks of Daylight Time. So what?”
Do you have a Videocassette Recorder (VCR)? A Digital Video Recorder (VDR)? TiVo? Digital clocks? Digital phone machine? Other devices with built-in clocks? Many of these built-in clocks have hard-wired into their little chip brains a set of instructions: “If DST is set to ON, and it is the first Sunday in April, at 2:00 am, change the time to 3:00 am.” Similarly, “if DST is set to ON, and it is the last Sunday in October, at 2:00 am, change the time to 1:00 am.”
There’s no way to get into those little chips and say, “Uncle Sam would like to have a word with you.”
Not only will you have to manually reset all the clocks, including the ones that used to reset themselves; but you will also have to remember to find your way into Settings and turn DST to OFF. Otherwise, two weeks after you change the clocks in March, the chips will automatically change them to the wrong time in April. And again in November.
So how come I know about this and you haven’t heard of it? I work for an Information Technology (read: computers) company and an email went out this morning about the affect this is going to have on all of the systems that have DST incorporated into them. The email also said not to plan on messing with our company computer clocks because they have a plan for taking care of that.
There’s only one answer to this madness:
Move to either one of the great states of
For more information about Daylight Saving Time, including some history (did you know that Standard Time was instituted by railroads?), go to…
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.html
Love, as always,
Pete
| Previous | Next |