The Daylight Savings Time shuffle

Is one of your timekeeping gadgets off by an hour this week? If so, you're not alone.

It might be silly to talk about the duplicitous hands of time or tick-tock treachery. But the fact remains that at least some folks, who trusted their alarm clocks to wake them up on time this week, found themselves running an hour behind.

Blame it on daylight saving time, whose slippery "spring forward -- fall back" formula is enough to confound all but the most mathematically astute. This week's problem arose when daylight saving time, which traditionally ends on the last Sunday in October, was extended to the first Sunday in November.

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Unless PC owners installed patches provided by Microsoft or Apple, their machines, like the clueless clocks, would have registered the wrong time.

Some Houston computer stores e-mailed their customers to remind them of the delay in the resumption of Standard Time.

The change in the time switch came this year as part of the Energy Conservation Act designed to give Americans a bit more daylight -- and energy savings.

President Bush signed the law in 2005.

The law also affected the beginning of daylight saving time, moving it to the second Sunday in March from the first Sunday in April.

And there were many problems with that earlier start to DST. At least from a BlackBerry perspective, the patch that was rolled out in haste back in February also fixed the issue at this end. So professionally speaking, it's all good for me.

As it happens, I'm using a spiffy new alarm clock these days that has a DST auto-adjust feature built in. Since it did not fall back this weekend, I assume it was already hip to the new DST endpoints. I'm putting my BlackBerry on my nightstand this Saturday anyway, just in case. We'll see what happens.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on October 31, 2007 to Technology, science, and math