Good morning. It’s April 6, 2008. I just turned on my computer to check my emails, and noticed that the time seemed to be a bit late.
Like by an hour.
I suspect that, had Congress not acted to extend the Daylight Savings Time dates, today would have been the day for going there, yes? And my computer is programmed with the prior dates, somewhere, so it activated the pre-scheduled change.
If I’m correct in this, where exactly is the schedule entered, and is there any worth-the-effort means of resetting the start and end dates, so that it automatically goes in and out of DST on the same days the rest of the country does it?
And for anyone who can use the heads-up, check your clock.
Unfortunately, the DST rule is not something you are intended to administer. It generally has to be changed by applying a software patch or update[sup]*[/sup]. If you have an older OS, and you haven’t been keeping up with updates, you may not wish to bother for just this issue.
[sup]*[/sup] - it does appear that on Windows you can muck about in the registry to change the time zone rule. I suspect that the average user will not want to do that.
Thanks for the responses, all. I hope the heads-up was useful to someone.
BTW, I bought Kaylasmom a clock radio at the Goodwill a couple of months ago, and it was showing 9:15 at 8:15 today. I know I’m not going to bother trying to find a patch for that.
Easy work around is to go into the clock settings and deselect “Automatically adjust clock for daylight savings changes.” Then when DST starts or finishes you just go back into the clock and change your timezone by an hour.
The “spring forward” happened to us yesterday, on our auto-setting Atomic Alarm Clock. So, since it “sprang forward” of its own accord, and because my wife had set the alarm so that she could ride with her sister to her uncle’s funeral (a three hour drive away), we both ended up waking up an hour earlier than we needed to. She woke me up at 7 (according to the clock), and as I blearily stumbled through my morning routine, I finally asked, “why does that clock say it’s 6:20?” “Oh, that clock’s slow.” “But other clocks say 6:20 too…” That’s when I finally realized what had happened. We ended up with a little time to kill.
Interestingly, unplugging the atomic clock and plugging it back in didn’t fix the problem; it automatically set itself to the wrong time, an hour ahead. Had to turn it back manually.
Which makes sense when you think about it - the signal it receives by radio reports the time in UTC or some other timezone/dst independent format. Displaying that time for your timezone, with your dst setting is the responsibility of your clock, which still has the wrong DST rule built into it.
