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Y2K Heck! What about DST!


No entity is better than government at avoiding the understanding of how its actions cause way bigger problems than they were intended to fix. The federal requirement to change when Daylight Savings Time begins is causing untold millions of dollars of computer fixes to be applied just to be in compliance, and that's not even taking into consideration what the program patches might break in the process. (Updated: 2/23/2007)

If you have a SmartPhone, you might want to check here to see how you might be affected.

How come my COBOL programs won't compile today? They did about a week ago. The only thing that's changed is that our system techs applied Daylight Savings Time program patches to a whole bunch of our servers over the weekend.

I sure wish I lived in Arizona about now, because they don't do the DST shuffle.

Do you have Windows Vista or XP with service pack 2? If not, on March 11th, the new beginning date for daylight savings time, will catch you by surprise. And all because of the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005, which gives the culprits just long enough to be forgotten. I'm sure FedGov has a reason for screwing up a simple thing like daylight savings, but heaven knows they'll never tell us.

I have discovered one small advantage, though. I won't miss the first hour of the April Sunday Morning session of LDS General Conference anymore because I forgot to set my clock back Saturday night.

It's really not nearly as bad as the fixes we had to do for the Y2K non-scare, but nonetheless it's pretty irritating that at least millions of dollars of technical manpower have been expended to apply operating system patches, apply delivered software patches, apply database patches, update configuration files, and then figure out what else broke besides my COBOL compiles.

Hey, why don't we fix all the anomalies in the English language while we're at it, Congress?

If we have to have Daylight Savings Time, why don't we just do it like Iraq? On the FIRST DAY of April they spring forward, and on the FIRST DAY of October they fall back. I guess our pagano-Christian heritage, which gave us the convoluted process for determining Easter, has infected our ability to determine when to fix our clocks.

And we're all paying for it.
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Comments

  1. Scott Hinrichs2/21/2007 09:37:00 AM

    I detest the whole shifting back and forth thing. Just pick a slice in the middle and leave it there.

    ReplyDelete

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