Eengstro’s Blog » daylight saving time http://blog.eengstro.com Just another typical white geek Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:49:16 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Stop stealing my mornings http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/10/25/stop-stealing-my-mornings http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/10/25/stop-stealing-my-mornings#comments Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:53:55 +0000 Eengstro http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/10/25/stop-stealing-my-mornings/ I’m not much of a morning person, and I have a very difficult time getting up if there’s no light outside. That said, I generally exercise in the mornings before work, so on most mornings my alarm goes off at 6:20am. Usually 6:20am isn’t too bad, since it’s around dawn or sunrise.

This morning, sunrise was at 7:19am. I’ve been waking up in the dark for the better part of a month, and now I’m waking up a full hour before sunrise. The problem is Daylight Saving Time — it’s moving daylight from when I need it (morning) to when I don’t need it (evening).

Don’t get me wrong: during the summer, DST is great. Sunrise is still early enough to wake me up, and I get the extra hour of light in the evening. The problem is that it isn’t summer anymore! We’re more than a month into Autumn.

When Congress adjusted DST in 2005, they went the wrong way. DST should have been made shorter, not longer. I would say that the last Sunday in April to the first Sunday in October would work well for DST.

]]> http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/10/25/stop-stealing-my-mornings/feed 0 iPod is confused about DST http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/09/07/ipod-is-confused-about-dst http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/09/07/ipod-is-confused-about-dst#comments Sat, 08 Sep 2007 01:13:05 +0000 Eengstro http://blog.eengstro.com/2007/09/07/ipod-is-confused-about-dst/ I’m standing in the local Apple store, typing this entry on a MacBook. Next to me is a new “classic” iPod. The new iPods have a “clock” feature, where you can enter multiple locations, and it will display the time at each location, side-by-side.

This is a nifty feature, except for one problem: during Daylight Saving Time, it calculates the time at foreign locations incorrectly. For example, the two locations I entered were “California” and “Hong Kong”. During Standard Time, Hong Kong is 16 hours ahead of California, but during Daylight Saving Time, it is only 15 hours ahead. But while it is 6:08pm in California, the iPod is displaying 10:08am in Hong Kong. It is actually 9:08am in Hong Kong — 15 hours ahead.

The same error is made with locations within the United States that do not observe DST. For instance, it is currently 3:08pm in Honolulu, but the iPod displays it as 4:08pm.

The iPod and the Mac it’s connected to both seem to be configured to observe DST, so I’m pretty sure this isn’t a configuration issue. My conclusion is that this is a bug. A rather annoying and obvious bug that should have been caught before release.

BTW, I like the keyboard on this MacBook. I’m not typing double characters like I often do on other laptops.

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