With all the recent hubbub about the big changes being made to the Daylight Saving Time system (specifically the activation date), a lot of folks are crying "malarchy" about the potential impacts, especially in the financial sector. They point to Y2K and how that "huge threat" never amounted to anything. As an IT Specialist, I have to find that somewhat offensive.

I will most certainly grant that there was a great deal of hyperbole surrounding Y2K's potential impacts. Some idiots were running around screaming that water would disappear and planes would fall from the sky. That was all nonsensical bullshit. I mean, really - an arbitrary date change was not going to alter the fundamentals of basic physics or make matter disappear. The number itself is completely fabricated - it only mattered to those that used it in their everyday lives. The Chinese didn't give a rat's ass - they've got their own calendar, and it wasn't "2000."

Anyway, on the other side of the coin were all the people with the opposite reaction - that absolutely nothing would happen, nothing would go wrong - there would be no problems. In January of 2000, these people strode confidently around, smugly smirking at everyone that told them that it was a genuine problem. These people are just as ignorant as the "airplanes falling from the sky" people.

The truth is that nothing major happened because of tens of thousands of talented IT people, including me, that busted their asses to identify problem code and systems and fix it. Saying that there was never a problem is like telling a New York City cop that he's a waste of taxpayer money because crime in New York is low.

The same can be said for the Daylight Saving Time correction. Millions of systems, especially financial systems (such as banks and mortgage companies) and complex scheduling systems (such as airlines and airports) rely on the exact time to calculate interest or remain in sync with hundreds of other complex schedule systems to keep things running right.

If your bank flubbed the interest on your mortgage, you'd be upset (unless it happened to be in your favor, but that NEVER happens). If American Airlines has fixed their DST, but Delta hasn't, I don't want to be sitting on ANY plane when that screwup comes back to bite them in the ass.

Perhaps the moral of the story.... Hug an IT person today. No matter who you are, there are hundreds of us touching all facets of your life, helping you keep track of who you are. Some of us are as fun to talk to as a box of hammers (programmers, I'm talking about you!), but either way we are there for you every day, and most of us are on call 24 hours a day.

It seems the earlier visit by our Furry Rat predicting an early spring, may have gotten a boast out of his shadowy hole by Daylight Savings time.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with first proposing the idea of Daylight Saving Time in 1784. He hoped to save on candles. The United States didn't get around to even agreeing on what Standard Time was until 1883, when the railroads clamored for some uniformity. Daylight Saving Time as we now know it was signed into law in with the Uniform Time Act of 1966. Before that act, someone traveling a 35-mile stretch of Highway 2 in West Virginia and Ohio would have had to change a watch setting SEVEN times to remain current.

In case you didn't know, that will happen four weeks earlier this year, thanks to congressional fiat. Will your computer be ready?
And though it might not seem like a big deal, consider this:

Every e-mail you send is stamped with the time it was sent, as are important transactions such as the automatic deposits you make to a savings account or payments you make on-line on a credit card balance.

In some cases, your computer's clock being off by an hour can make a difference, and many computers are still operating under the assumption that daylight saving time is coming April 1, not March 11 — meaning that precious hour could very well be lost for you.

So what to do? Start checking all of your computer hardware and software now, to see what needs to be fixed before you run into a problem.
For a home user running one computer on the dominant Windows operating system, a quick visit to Microsoft's Support Listings will tell you whether you have anything to worry about: If your computer is running Windows XP with the Service Pack 2 upgrade, or Windows Vista, carry on as usual — your system will update itself. But if you're running XP and didn't take the SP2 upgrade, nows the time to do so.

Older versions of Windows, such as Windows 2000 or NT, you need to visit Microsoft on-line for: US here to get specific instructions. Or you could wait until your clock is inaccurate and change it manually.

If you byte the Apple (pun intended) they say OS X operating system was "patched" with a fix for the problem months ago. Anyone running the system should have already gotten an automatic update and won't have a problem. Believe that one...and the smug guy in the TV Commercials will tell you another one.

Apple has not posted sufficient information regarding how the change in Daylight Saving Time affects their products, nor which products are patched or unpatched. This situation is sadly familiar, for they likewise do not post life cycle support schedules for Mac OS X (again in contrast with Microsoft, Red Hat, and Sun), leaving customers to guess whether they can expect patches for security vulnerabilities. In this case, it's a simple matter of making sure the clock is right, and Apple's silent, de facto message of "upgrade to Tiger" is woefully inappropriate.

For IT's, running many other applications and systems, as well as the knowledgeable user this link provided by Berkley Education should provide all you need to make the changes. Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes in 2007

Last but not least, Blackberry nuts, don't forget, since any electronic devices will be affected, and you wouldn't want to be late for that corporate meeting, or that clandestine affair you've been having, maybe arriving a bit early or a bit late could be a major disaster or at least a blushing moment. (Smile)

I think we all need one of those Robby the Robots screaming Danger..Danger...Danger...you idiot!....the government is at it again.

Todays Quote: "The most successful people are those who are good at plan B"

A group called "Union of Concerned Scientists" have enticed us with a poll to show that the Bush administration is silencing global warming research. This immediately brings to mind Michael Crichton's words: "There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period."

At any rate this group gives us a survey of 1,600 federal climate scientists, as evidence that the Bush administration was engaged in "political interference in climate science" that has brought a "system-wide epidemic." Dennis Byrne takes a look at the numbers, and it appears that Dr. Francesca Grifo, Director of the group is guilty by his own words that: "Tailoring scientific fact for political purposes has become a problem across many federal science agencies."


And finally the questions were worded so poorly that while those taking the poll assumed the answers were about global warming, they could easily have been about working conditions. Dr. Grifo, if not the UCS group is as best the pot calling the kettle black, and at worst using politics to counter what can't be done with science.

Do I buy global warming? Sure without a doubt, historically global average climate has been cycling between 12C (53.6F) and 22C (71.6F). The historical norm from 1860 to 2000 has been 15.08C (59.14F) which mean we have to warm at least another 3F to reach our historical mean. Of course historical figures need to be taken with a large grain of salt because they are estimated from ambiguous findings like from core samples and tree ring growth. However if they are going to use those figures in their models to prove that we are dooming ourselves, I can use them to show we are nowhere near average.

It is also quite likely that humans are contributing some amount to to greenhouse gas accumulation, but they cannot with any scientific certainly tell us what (if any) that extra human contribution is having of global temperatures.

Via Lucianne.

In our modern age, the diner, coffee shop or water cooler is often replaced with online forums. There are millions of them - for bands, television shows, actors, games, operating systems, local news, politics - probably just about everything. As we spend time at one, or many, we develop relationships with others, indeed sometimes more important than those we have with flesh and bone acquaintances (an idea recently explored in the mainstream on an episode of "My Name is Earl," one of the best shows on TV). I've spent time on many forums in the last several years, and lived on various BBSes in the early 80s and even my rudimentary UNIX college network in the late 80s.

But what happens when the diner burns down? Too much grease for the gyros, or whatever. Generally, you contact your friends in some other way, and meet elsewhere until "your" diner is rebuilt. Because you've established so many means of communication with these people, you have contact redundancy, and you can all adapt and move on with minimal interruption.

What happens when your favorite forum is down, though? I'm finding that out right now. For the last several years, I've been a regular poster at the forum for our local newspaper. The discussions, especially about politics and religion, can get really heated and passionate. These are things about which so many people feel so strongly, yet so differently about, that calamity is the only possible result.

Regardless, I went to "my" forum on Friday, and I got a 404 error. No biggie, it happens from time to time. It'll be back a little later, I told myself. It wasn't back later, and then by Friday night - when I knew anyone that could be working on it had gone home for beer, chips, and World of Warcraft - I really started to wonder. "Would it be back? Is it shut down? Gone forever? Did someone's post go too far, so far that the publishers decided the forum itself was too much of a liability?"

It remained down all weekend, and then early yesterday morning, the site's main page told a story of a massive server failure, and that they were working on getting the forum back online. It was a relief, and in that relief I realized that for almost all of my friends and antagonists there (there are a few lingering trolls), I didn't have any means of contacting ANY of them if that forum was gone, and never to return. If this forum is scrapped, relationships I've spent years building - for good or naught - will be gone as if everyone died in a fiery synchronized swimming accident. That's a pretty major loss.

Think about it. When my forum returns, there are several people I will reach out to - break the anonymity - and ensure that we can continue our friendships long after our diner is scrapped for lack of shareholder value. I encourage everyone reading this to think about who their friends are and do the same.

“The loss of a friend is like that of a limb; time may heal the anguish of the wound, but the loss cannot be repaired.” - Robert Southey

Oh sorry, about the heading..that should be Bombs! Just when I had a handle on reality, Google that "Do No Evil" (evil monster under the Internet Bed,) had to go and screw it up.

Google's decision to remove google boobs may spell relief for the list of public figures who have been mocked. Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, Tony Blair, Rick Santorum, and John Kerry are a few of the people who join George W. Bush as victims. However, this only affects Google's search engine, so others like Yahoo and Ask still produce the boobed results.

A post by Matt Cutts on the official Google blog explained the company's change. "Over time, we've seen more people assume that they are Google's opinion, or that Google has hand-coded the results for these Googlebombed queries," the blog reads. "That's not true, and it seemed like it was worth trying to correct that misperception." Source: The Boob itself


Seems I'll have to switch my search engine.

No more bookstores?