DST · 2:34am Mar 14th, 2022
Never forget what they took from you.
Source
That’s right, here in the USA, one of the early signs of spring is when the Government steals an hour in the dead of the night.
Why? Who knows, it’s a mystery.
I was enjoying there actually being daylight when I left for work in the morning, but They took that from me.
And this of course means I’ve got to get up an hour earlier to get to work on time.
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As dumb as Daylight Saving Time is, it’s kinda an early sign of spring. Sort of like a pre-spring announcement. Yesterday I also saw some early season robins checking out nesting areas, I assume, and poking at the ground looking for whatever it it that robins eat.
Today, to celebrate the first day of Daylight Saving Time, the weather peagasi decided that snow would be perfect.
Anyway, happy Daylight Saving Time to all my followers who celebrate it.
Blame Benjamin Franklin for anything regarding time change like this. He started it and both World Wars used it to help with rationing stuff. Plus parts of Arizona and Hawaii don’t change their clocks.
laughs in Arizona
The best part of DST is that most of Europe uses it too, but they don't change their clocks on the same date. So when you're running a major international online community with scheduled events, it's not like just the minority of the people who don't use DST ever that have to memorize when the schedule changes, it's also everyone who's used to a fixed offset except for like two seperated two week periods of the year. Sure was fun trying seeing people try to show up at the 'same time' yesterday and today.
Aussie here, we'll get your extra hour next month, not sure where it goes until then.
Yep, got hit with snow over in NY, too. And of course, to celebrate DST I just decided to stay up all night so I'd be tired and go to bed at my normal time anyway. Boom, DST jetlag problem solved.
5643649
He'd actually intended it as a joke, so I'm not sure how much blame he should take.
The weather pegasi have been a little strange lately.
Maybe that pink unicorn spilling water on peagsi while in an earth pony bed while asleep could be a part of it. Seems pretty unfair when that pegasus would be much happier in a cloud bed.
I like DST and would be perfectly happy with year-round DST.
You complain about it being dark when you leave for work. I complain about it being dark when I leave from work. So DST helps with that.
5643657
Hey, he stole credit for things he can take the blame for things too.
And if you think you guys have it rough, try working through it. I got robbed an hour of pay last night, at least in the fall I get a 9 hour shift instead of the measly 7 I got last night
(shrug) Doesn't matter to me much either way.
5643658
Could just be a matter of personal preference. I mean, for example, give me a choice between my regular full-sized bed and a water bed, and for all the advantages the latter bed offers I'd still take a regular bed any day. People (and ponies, apparently) are weird like that. >^_^<
5643671
It is more noble if it is a sacrifice for their non-winged brethren.
Crossposted from my DeviantArt Status Update this morning:
This is a semi-annual reminder that Daylight Savings Time doesn't do any of the things it was supposed to, unless it was supposed to kill people.
5643667
That's all well and good. The problem is changing the time back and forth (numerous studies show it leads to health problems etc.), not so much where the time is set.
Although keep in mind older people have a harder time driving when it's dark, so when things get dark that can inhibit people's ability to be independent. (Not sure which way is better in that case, though.)
And DST is only the most visible part of this. Timekeeping is super weird in general. Especially if you have to handle historical dates, because the rules change over time. In fact most computers use UTC internally and convert to and from local time on the fly (using tzdata) when interacting with humans, because it's easier that way.
Hm, the leading 0 on that digital clock displaying 03:00 makes me wonder if it's set to display in 24-hour format?
(Unfortunately, the clock radio in my room doesn't display a leading 0 for times before 10:00 even after I modified it to have a 12h/24h switch (that I always leave on 24h) instead of being hardwired for 12h, but it at least has the excuse that it lacks some segments in that position of the display required for displaying a 0 there. My Casio watch on the other hand has no excuse for omitting that 0 in 24-hour mode, because I *know* that it has the segments for that, because it uses them in stopwatch mode!)
5643651
Give times in UTC and let people apply their local offset from there? (UTC-5 during DST for me.)
Windows can even be set up to display times for several timezones in a tooltip when the system tray clock is hovered over (I configured mine to show Local, Pacific, and UTC).
And apparently at least the more recent versions of the clock app that ships with Android have a similar feature as well. (Though it seems that UTC is the only one that you can add by timezone rather than by location, and you apparently can't change the display name or add a nickname to extra ones added by location.)
5643657
Time zones came into widespread use in the 19th century when railroads made it possible to travel far enough, fast enough for it to matter.
Before then, every town just kept their own local time.
Will Rodgers was part Cherokee (?) & used to tell Dumb Indian jokes about "My Uncle John back on the reservation."
His comment on DST:
"My Uncle John back on the reservation had a blanket that was 24 foot long. But that wasn't long enough to suit Uncle John. So he cut a foot off the top and sewed it onto the bottom to make it longer."
I think most people don't actually mind DST, but the change. Personally I'd be happy to stay on DST year round and never "fall back". I hate how it gets dark so early in the evenings during standard time. But I don't mind the darkness in the morning. Guess it depends on when you want your extra helping of darkness!
I thought DST rules were set down years ago and so shouldnt be that hard to have as a little file somewhere on a UN Standards Central page, or until they can agree on just where abouts in Greenwhich that UTCA is fixed to, at a given point in time, so that the meter kilo relativity correction is zeroed? Given the North Atlantic is spreading, then shouldnt the ridge be drifting west, as its pushing the navigationally fixed location away from it?
5643703
Agreed. I like having a bit of extra darkness in the morning myself, but I imagine that wouldn't go over so well for parents who don't like the thought of taking their kids to school when it's pitch black outside. ()^_^
5643657
TIL that satire has, in fact, been dead since 1776.
5643703
As much as I like the thought of keeping solar noon as close to clock noon as possible, there is something nice about waking up in the dark and watching the dawn. Yes, you can do that year-round, but it quickly leaves reasonable hours if you stay on standard time year-round.
5643710
Countries (and US states) change their DST rules (or entire time zone) with surprising frequency. Each individual locality may only change its rules once or twice throughout its existence, but there are many localities throughout the world. Look up the time zone of Indiana for a “fun” time.
5643696
UTC times work for single future events, but give wrong answers for recurring meetings. Imagine a calendar reminder for a religious observance that is always at 8 am local time on the third Friday of the month. It doesn’t matter where you are, when the clocks on nearby walls say 8:00, it’s time for prayers & prostration. Another scenario is the weekly staff meeting at 10:00 each Tuesday in the local time of HQ. Setting up a recurring calendar event would either require *two* events stored as UTC, one for when HQ is on DST and another for when it’s not, or explicitly state that the 10:00 each Tuesday is relative to the time zone of headquarters and let the software calculate when it is in UTC for each week and then convert it to local time for display.
5643723
Doesn't all software in the world already do that? Computers understand time in terms of UTC. (That is, they all use UTC+0 internally even if they are not set to that time zone) This is because computers that are networked together need to share the same representation of the "current instant" or lots of encryption algorithms and communication protocols wouldn't work correctly. The operating system only displays time in our local time zones for the human operator's benefit.
5643861
Unless you're on Windows. Then the fool thing also stores the local time in the motherboard's clock to be remembered across power-off.
(If you dual-boot Windows and Linux on the same machine, you have to set Linux to do likewise or they'll confuse each other as they fight over whether the motherboard's clock should be thinking in UTC or local time.)
...that is, assuming Windows didn't decide to fix that with the switch to UEFI... but given that the XSLX spec still bakes in datetime bugs from Excel 1.0 when converting from XSL would have been the perfect time to fix them, I'm not holding my breath.
5643723
The latter is how it's handled internally. Standards like iCalendar use a modified form of ISO8601 where you can specify a timezone for the date to be relative to, but it's done by referencing a tzdata ID rather than a fixed offset, so events can automatically adapt to legislated changes.
I mean, I'm affected by it, but I'm not sure "celebrate" is the right word...
...But at least this year it appears to have led to a blog full of cute pony pictures, so there's that. :)
5643723
Time zones, thank you very much. There's more than one.
And it used to be that they'd have the same UTC offset as each other during DST (UTC-5), and different offsets from each other the rest of the year (UTC-6 and UTC-5), but now they have different offsets all year (UTC-6 and UTC-5 outside DST, and UTC-5 and UTC-4 during DST).
5643649 He was joking lol. Pretty obviously, too. Not like how he wrote a bunch of cryptic jokes for smart people to find.