epc: prescient to know something will happen but not smart enough to do anything about it

Yesterday I wrote a post on the new timezone changes for the U.S. coming up in March over here: Changing Times at my "work" blog. It's also covered in today's Washington Post: Clocks' Early Spring Forward May Bring About a Few Falls.

Net: in 2005 the U.S. Congress shifted the start and end of Daylight Savings Time by four weeks (starting three weeks earlier on the second Sunday of March, and ending a week later on the first Sunday of November). When the law passed I said: Self, that will be trouble and promptly filed the thought away in the warren of notes to myself. One would think that a year or more is plenty of lead time to update all of the software to accommodate a shift in the time zones, one would be wrong to do so.

This is the first nation-wide change of time zones since the mid-1980s, the first to occur since computers and computer technology became pervasive in U.S. households (this affects Canada as well since their Parliament opted to sync up with the U.S.). In theory software rely upon a database of timezone data since they do change, in practice a lot of this stuff gets hard coded (think of all of your non-network attached technologies which may have some sense of standard time v.s. daylight time which can't be easily updated).

I predict that there will be lots of missed meetings due to the problem of what do you do with a meeting schedule for 1:00 p.m. EST on March 12, 2007? Should it be moved to 1:00 p.m. EDT? Or Should it remain at 1:00 p.m. EST?

Luckily the dogs do not care so long as I walk them some time between 2:00 p.m. dog standard time and 5:00.