mg.to - Daylight Saving Tax - Comments

Michael, I'm sure that you know that real operating systems u

John Serafin — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 07:19:45 +0000

Michael,

I’m sure that you know that real operating systems use UTC and only use time zones and daylight saving when displaying or receiving time. Every user and even every process may be using a different time zone. This also ensures that file timestamps are consistent with each other.

Benjamin Franklin? Fascinating! Thanks for the info, Roy.

Michael Geary — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:31:15 +0000

Benjamin Franklin? Fascinating! Thanks for the info, Roy.

I was hoping I could blame those Democrat and Republican scoundrels, and it turns out to be one of my heros!

I still don’t like daylight time, but how can I be mad at a cool dude like Ben? :-)

Whose idea was this? Not Democrats. Not Republicans.

Roy Green — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 21:22:37 +0000

Whose idea was this? Not Democrats. Not Republicans.

Benjamin Franklin

Daylight Saving Tax

Michael Geary — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 17:27:32 +0000

How many clocks did you have to change today? This year I’m pretty lucky. I only had to change 19.

Of course, I’ll probably find a few more in the next few days.

Here’s the list so far, for our family of four:

Oven
Microwave
Answering machine
Two wall clocks
Four cameras
Sony reverb (yes, it has a clock)
Two thermostats
Three alarm clocks
Fax machine
Sprinkler system
Two cars

Some years have been worse. I recall changing 28 clocks about ten years ago. That was before my computers adjusted themselves for daylight time. For a while that made things even worse, though: I was dual booting Windows 95 and NT, and when the time changed, both OSes decided to adjust the time for me. So I was an hour off in the wrong direction.

Now I do all my software testing in VMware virtual machines, and I’ve given up on putting those on daylight time. I let them run on standard time all year around, otherwise it gets too annoying. Revert to a snapshot and it will want to adjust the time all over again.

I do have one atomic clock that set itself back to standard time automatically. But my daughters have atomic clocks that didn’t, and I don’t see any way to change them unless I turn off the radio synchronization and set them manually. Must research this.

I can’t wait for spring, when we do it all over again, and probably get to church an hour late.

Whose idea was this? Democrats? Republicans? A pox on both their houses. The Libertarians would never pull a stunt like this.

Update: Roy Green informs me that it was not the Democrats, not the Republicans, and not even the Libertarians, but my hero Benjamin Franklin!