Well Daylight Savings has finally finished here in Australia and while I do enjoy it from the perspective of enjoying our summer evenings, I don’t enjoy it in terms of my blogging because it puts me on a wacky time schedule when connecting with my North American blogging friends.
Negotiating time zones is difficult enough but the combination of us putting our clocks forward and hour and others putting their clocks back an hour makes chatting via IM with Canadian and American bloggers all the more difficult. I can’t remember the last time that Jeremy and I had a meeting when one of us wasn’t bleary eyed from having just gotten up and the other wasn’t exhausted from a long day and was ready for bed.
The next 6 months isn’t much fun in terms of weather here in Melbourne (that’s why I’m escaping it tomorrow for a couple of weeks) but means some of those blogging relationships that have quietened lately might just take off again.
It also causes strange things like my reply to someone’s comment appearing before their comment, when you forget to reset the blog’s time zone offset BEFORE making your post. :)
Daylight saving time begins here in the U.S. in just a few hours, so it’ll be all over soon…
Darren, it appears that you and I are in the same boat. I live in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, and we are going on Eastern Daylight Time tonight (2 a.m . Sunday morning, actually) for the first time in decades. This has little to do with blogging, but a lot to do with self-government … so what the heck? In the USA, time zones were instituted by the federal government to benefit the railroads in the 19th Century; transcontinental railroads needed standardized time to avoid smacking into each other. That’s why the U.S. Department of Transportation continues to administer time zones.
While time zones are a federal decision, the decision to employ daylight time is made on a state or local level. For the past few decades, Indianapolis, Phoenix, and Honolulu (I think…) have been the only large US cities not observing daylight time. This put us in Indiana (we call ourselves “Hoosiers”) in the same predictament as you in Melbourne — no one beyond our borders knew what time it was in Indianapolis. Believe or not, Indiana citizens and legislators fought about Daylight Savings Time for several decades before the General Assembly decided on a one-vote margin last year to observe daylight time along with most other places. I cannot say where this leaves Phoenix.
Just as you and your fellow “down under” citizens fell back tonight, I am looking forward to the opportunity to “spring forward” tonight for the first time in the 23 years I have lived in Indianapolis.
For us, summer and an hour’s more sunshine in the evening is on the way. I bid you as pleasant a winter as possible. Good night and good luck.
I see my post is timed on your blog local time in Melbourne as 11:03 a.m. on Sunday, April 2, 2006. For the record, since time is of the essence in this thread, it is now in Indianapolis 7:04 p.m. on Saturday, April 1, 2006. Sunday at this “solar time,” it will be 8:04 p.m. Ain’t it grand to live in modern times and instant global communications?
Douglass
same problem here, we have 5 different time zones over summer because Queensland, NT and WA don’t have daylight savings…damn silly business.
I never realised it was so complicated. In England we put our clocks forward a week ago! Maybe we should all just take on the same time and stop basing it on daylight. How confusing is all this going to be when space travel becomes more mainstream? What system does Star Trek use?
For the record local time is now 13:40 on Sunday 2nd April 2006
Hey Alan,
Star Trek goes by star date xxx.xx.x
But they never mention WHICH star…
Joe