I hope you know that Daylight Savings Time is screwed up this year

And for some of your clock-based appliances, such as VCRs, it may be screwed up forever. The Prez and Congresscritters, in their infinite wisdom, thought that lengthening daylight savings time by four weeks or so would save energy. I don't think it will, but what do I know. The most serious ramifications are people who regularly do teleconferencing across multiple time zones or even internationally, but chances are that you'll now have to manually update your VCR twice a year.

Since DST is coming up (this year it's March 11), I thought it would be a good idea to post this. Allegedly patches have been released for Windows operating systems (Vista should be fine since the code was finalized after the law was passed), I have no idea about Apple OS or any of the *nix distros. Oh, of course this assumes that you have your Windows computer set to automatically apply system updates. If you don't, then you need to do some updating soonish.



Feb 13, 9:05 PM EST

Time Change to Bring Computer Glitches

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN
AP Technology Writer

Daylight-saving time ends in North America and Europe on Sunday at 2 a.m. locally. Clocks move back one hour to standard time.

For three weeks this March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs "should view any appointments ... as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees." Wow, that's sort of jarring - is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it's a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created earlier is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March (that's March 11 this year).

The result is a glitch reminiscent of the Y2K bug, when cataclysmic crashes were feared if computers interpreted the year 2000 as 1900 and couldn't reconcile time appearing to move backward. This bug is much less threatening, but it could cause head-scratching episodes when some computers are an hour off.
( Read more... )

Bleh

Guess who normally buys Peter Pan Peanut Butter?!

I have two jars of the contaminated stuff sitting on the counter, apparently ConAgra has changed their policy and I can take them back to the store that I bought them from. The problem is that no one else makes honey nut peanut butter (or at least they aren't carried here), and there's no telling when uncontaminated stuff is back on the shelves (assuming I'm willing to trust them in the future).

I haven't eaten any since Thursday breakfast, but I had some rather major "inconveniences" while at the Renaissance Festival Saturday (and some Sunday and some Monday).

I don't know that I've actually contracted salmonella, but I haven't recovered fully from the cold that I caught at the end of January. Well, the cold is over, but I had a sinus infection, and I don't think that has entirely cleared. Something has been keeping me down (it's THE MAN!) and it ain't any fun. Both tonight and last Thursday I had coughing fits in my photography class, and I hadn't had a problem with coughing today until I got in that classroom.

Add to that my shakes, my torso and my arm are twitching right now. I don't think the stuff the doctor has me on is doing any good, and I'm seeing him Thursday and will probably stop taking it.

So... bleh.