Spring forward

This was tried many years ago. I remember clearly when it happened since I was a grade schooler in the midwest (I'm in my mid 40's now) The problem was that we were going to school in the dark. Nobody thought about this but there were little kids walking to the school bus stops basically in the middle of the night and it was actually rather dangerous. Our parents were upset, the schools were upset, and we were upset since we were all scared to go to school. The states spent small fortunes on free reflective tape that we put on our jackets. It was never done again.

I heard an interesting report yesterday about DST. Some researchers with a lot of time on their hands ;-) did a study of energy records in Indiana, comapring usage with and without DST. It seems energy use is actually higher by 1 to 4 percent during DST, not lower as most expected. Ben Franklin invented DST when the major concern was having enough whale oil and candle wax for lighting. It seems in the modern age, our heating and air conditioning systems are the bigger users of energy, and during DST we make them work a little harder. Anyway, as the report pointed out, there is the social benefit of longer daylight in the evening and the playtime or neighborly socializing that comes with that (assuming you like your neighbors). Well, get ready to fire up the grill!

I'm not sure about this, but I thought they started messing around recently with when we were springing forward and falling back because of energy concerns. I thought the newer scheme will end up saving the USA money on energy?

I would like to see TWO hours of DST instead of one. I would also like to see it go year round. I realize the kids would be gioing to school in the dark but I think they and parents would eventually adapt.

Well, I just set 12 time pieces. Everything except my computer. I want to see what it is going to do. Because of the change in start and stop dates, I had to manually do it last time. I'll probably have to do it again.

I personally would like to see the time fixed one way or the other and then let schools, farmers and others adjust their operating time to what they need.

Aviation interests understand the need to have everyone using the same time. Thus they all operate on GMT or Zulu time. In my job I have to deal with different time zones all over the world. When you have states (AZ and IN) that do not do DST as well as other countries and then every country that does has different dates it can get confusing. It would be a nightmare without computers.

No big deal...I already called my boss and told him I will be an hour late everyday until this fall...

ShadowPuss, run Windows update and it should then change on it's own at the correct time.

Hey Mr Munchie, I took your advice and made sure that I had all the updates for W2K last night. And now I'm going to manually set my computer clock ahead and then I will manually set is back in a few weeks.

I found this support.microsoft.com but setting the clock by hand seems so much easier.

One would think MS could get this right but evidentially not.

J, I was talking about XP and Vista, not 2K.

support.microsoft.com

If you enjoy clubbing towards the end of the day shift, everyone will see you in the daylight in the parking lot.

My computer handles the new time changes just fine BTW, and my electric company sez that the entire country's electrical consumption is trimmed 1% for every day of DST.

hmmm, the electric company says people are saving electricity. Sometimes I question the source when there may be a conflict of interest. I turn down my heat while I sleep, then I crank it up and turn on a bunch of lights on a number of mornings when I get up. I don't think I'm saving any energy due to the time change. My big enery savings comes when the temperature outside approaches 70 degrees which it is supposed to do this week where I live. That's much better than the 27 degrees I encountered this morning.

I read 100 years of Global Warming had been wiped out with the recent dimming of the sun. I could believe it the other day when winds were gusting over 50 mph at my house and it was sunny and felt freezing cold. Hopefully any reports of a mini-ice age are just speculation because scientists think the sun will start to warm back up with the next solar cycle. Anyway, we'll survive whether or not it's cold outside.

Well, I guess I wasn't clear enough in what I said before. What my electric company was actually quoting about the 1% thing was from the U.S. Department of Transportation's statistics compiled since the 1970s.