Coyote Blog

13 Comments

1. Adam Vandenberg:

   We don't have a VCR anymore, just a cable-provided set-top DVR box. It happened to automatically adjust to the time difference, without missing any shows. All in all, it handled the change much better than I did personally; I didn't have to make the DVR extra coffee this morning.

   March 12, 2007, 11:27 am

2. Keith Casey:

   If people are setting their clocks back, they're worse off than before...

   March 12, 2007, 11:32 am

3. Craig:

   When you've been mired in cold, dark winter for several months, the extra hour of nighttime light is well worth the small inconvenience.

   March 12, 2007, 12:16 pm

4. Jim:

   Dear Arizona,

   Haven't touched them, but thanks for asking.

   Aloha,

   State of Hawaii

   March 12, 2007, 9:44 pm

5. markm:

   Yep, going to work in the dark again...

   Robert A. Heinlein once described daylight savings time as working on the principle that you can make a string longer by cutting a piece off one end and tying it on the other end.

   March 13, 2007, 2:12 pm

6. Highway:

   I don't mind DST. Personally, I wouldn't mind changing it permanently. I can see the issues tho, especially with time zones as large as they are. It's almost the kind of thing that they could subdivide each time zone into two, and have them alternate back and forth. I mean, it works out well here on the east coast, but in Michigan, light until 10 pm is weird in the middle of the year, and in winter getting light at 8:30 AM would suck. Like any arbitrary system, it's certainly not perfect. But blame the earth for the weird orbit. ;)

   March 13, 2007, 3:44 pm

7. Josh:

   It's not the orbit... it's the tilted axis of revolution.

   March 13, 2007, 7:24 pm

8. triticale:

   I don't use my video tape player to keep track of time; never did. In fact the deck we're using to feed our collection to the DVD burner doesn't have the stupid blinking 12:00 on it.

   March 13, 2007, 9:08 pm

9. Miles:

   I've often wondered why we even bother with time zones at all anymore. In this current 24-hour world-wide environment, wouldn't it make sense to just go to GMT/UCT worldwide and be done with it?

   March 14, 2007, 9:50 am

10. markm:

    Another thing: My employer was just absorbed by a larger company, with plants in Europe and Asia as well as the USA. The European plants switch to daylight savings time a couple of weeks later than the USA now does, and switch back a couple of weeks earlier. The Asian plants don't do DST. I'm not yet sure if headquarters in western Indiana switches or not. Coordinating conference calls across all those plants is bad enough with just the timezone differences (e.g., Thailand is 12 hours different from Eastern Standard time so someone is going to be coming back to work after supper), but the time differences keep changing due to DST kicking in and out at different times...

    March 14, 2007, 2:12 pm

11. Brad Warbiany:

    Mark,

    I know just how you feel. Back when I lived in California, when we would get on the phone with HQ in Taiwan, we could do it at about 4:30 or 5:30 (depending on DST), and that would be their 8:30 AM. Now that I'm on the east coast, I need to be making those same calls at 8-9 PM. Yet my work day still starts at 8:30 AM.

    March 14, 2007, 6:15 pm

12. Brad Warbiany:

    Oh, and throw the international date line in there, and it gets crazier. Our Sunday night is their Monday morning. So while I thankfully never have to talk to them at 9 PM on a Friday night, sometimes I do on a Sunday.

    And with the dateline, travel is interesting. When I visited over there, I left California on Saturday morning and arrived in Taipei (direct flight) on Sunday evening. Then, when I flew back I left there at midnight on Friday night, but returned to LA at 10 PM on Friday night. So I arrived two hours before I left.

    March 14, 2007, 6:17 pm

13. Erik Peterson:

    Working in IT, this week has been crazy. Trying to get hundreds of computers to all show the same correct time... You'd think its easy. But with the new legislation changing the date, we are going to have to deal with Windows trying to change the time again in a few weeks!

    March 17, 2007, 2:07 pm