Commentary

Alice LaPlante
 

Daylight-Saving Time: My Cable Box And Computer Worked Better Than I Did

News is trickling in that the three-week-early shift to daylight-saving time was not the disaster many feared. Perhaps it was all the advance mass almost-hysteria about the havoc it was going to cause that made everyone--from us ordinary PC and cell phone owners to senior IT managers--prepare sufficiently, but the transition seems to have gone smoothly.

News is trickling in that the three-week-early shift to daylight-saving time was not the disaster many feared. Perhaps it was all the advance mass almost-hysteria about the havoc it was going to cause that made everyone--from us ordinary PC and cell phone owners to senior IT managers--prepare sufficiently, but the transition seems to have gone smoothly.But in my household, our machines handled the change better (much better) than the humans did. We were supposed to meet another family for an outing at 8 a.m. Sunday. I got up at 7 a.m. (or so I thought) and roused everyone. My phone rang at the exact moment that I glanced at my cable box's time, and realized it was really 8:30. Sure enough, on the other end of the line was my friend wondering what had happened to us.

Everything else worked fine. Cell phone, computer, PDA. So it goes.


More Insights

White Papers

More >>

Reports

More >>

Webcasts

More >>

As happens every spring when daylight-saving time surprises us (well, some of us), there's the usual debate about whether it's worth it. The reason Congress gave for moving it up, of course, was saving energy. But some studies say this is just bunk. The reason? Sure, we switch lights off earlier in the evening. But what about these darker mornings? The energy we use to illuminate our homes then balances out what we save late in the day. Purely anecdotal, of course, but all the parents I talked to at school this morning when dropping off our kids said they had to switch lights on to shake their sleepy children awake.

What about you? How did your business handle the change? Any disruptions? Any missed meetings? Let us know by responding to the InformationWeek blog.


Related Reading




Currently we allow the following HTML tags in comments:

Single tags

These tags can be used alone and don't need an ending tag.

<br> Defines a single line break

<hr> Defines a horizontal line

Matching tags

These require an ending tag - e.g. <i>italic text</i>

<a> Defines an anchor

<b> Defines bold text

<big> Defines big text

<blockquote> Defines a long quotation

<caption> Defines a table caption

<cite> Defines a citation

<code> Defines computer code text

<em> Defines emphasized text

<fieldset> Defines a border around elements in a form

<h1> This is heading 1

<h2> This is heading 2

<h3> This is heading 3

<h4> This is heading 4

<h5> This is heading 5

<h6> This is heading 6

<i> Defines italic text

<p> Defines a paragraph

<pre> Defines preformatted text

<q> Defines a short quotation

<samp> Defines sample computer code text

<small> Defines small text

<span> Defines a section in a document

<s> Defines strikethrough text

<strike> Defines strikethrough text

<strong> Defines strong text

<sub> Defines subscripted text

<sup> Defines superscripted text

<u> Defines underlined text

InformationWeek encourages readers to engage in spirited, healthy debate, including taking us to task. However, InformationWeek moderates all comments posted to our site, and reserves the right to modify or remove any content that it determines to be derogatory, offensive, inflammatory, vulgar, irrelevant/off-topic, racist or obvious marketing/SPAM. InformationWeek further reserves the right to disable the profile of any commenter participating in said activities.

Disqus Tips To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy.
T-Shirt Giveaway T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting!
Subscribe to RSS

Resource Links