Thursday, March 15, 2007

Daylight Saving Time - woo hoo!

I'm loving the new early Daylight Saving Time. Notice, that I say "Saving" as opposed to "Savings". "It's not a SAVINGS bank!!" according to DST police Noorul. Interestingly enough, a Google search will produce 957,000 results for the incorrect "daylight savings time" and only 671,000 results for the correct "daylight saving time". Noorul, you have a long way to go on your mission!

My question is why ever go back to standard time? Lets do it all year round. Shift the time zones over. I hate when it gets dark at 3pm in December. I think it would also help curb seasonal depression. Even though you don't get more light hours, it gets dark later in the day. According to this article,
During energy crisis years, Congress enacted earlier starting dates for daylight time. In 1974, daylight time began on Jan. 6 and in 1975 it began on Feb. 23.
Can you imagine the uproar from IT people if we willy-nilly changed DST nowadays? I've heard that you need to go back to standard time for the farmers so they don't have to work in the dark in the mornings (they purport a negative impact on livestock - do the livestock really know what time it is?). I've also heard that you need to go back to protect kids from waiting for school buses in the dark. Any way you cut it, it's a political issue, be it energy savings, farmers or schools. I just hope it continues to remain in place for longer portions of the year.

Here's yet more info on the matter.

1 comment :

Bigqueue said...

Imagine the uproar.....it's only software! What else are these system programmers doing if not things like this.

First of all....it should all be taken care of automatically somehow. In this day and age of automatic software updates for virus or "you name it" upgrades, why is it so mind-boggling to send out a Daylight Saving Time (did I get that right) update!

Oh well....I remember the days when you had t recompile the Unix Kernel in order to change timezones! (I think that was Berkley Unix)

Such is life....