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Did You Spring Forward?

written by John Chow on March 11th, 2007

Daylight savings happens three weeks early this year. I would have completely forgotten about it if Ashley hadn’t told me to move my clock ahead by an hour last night.

Normally, your computers and VCR/DVD recorders will adjust for day light saving times all by itself because it knows the dates to “spring forward” and “fall back.” However, because the US decided to spring forward three weeks early, you’ll most likely have to manually adjust the clock today. Then you’ll have to adjust it again in three weeks.

The US estimates moving to daylight saving time three weeks earlier than schedule will save $47 billion in the next four years. And here I thought the only reason we do daylight savings was to watch the sun set at 8PM.

Do you have daylight savings where you are? I heard some countries go ahead by two hours instead of one, but I forgot their names.

Sean said on March 11th, 2007 at 10:55 am

We did it over here in Ontario, Canada ;). I had heard about it being early but, I didn’t find out until last night that it was…well, last night lol.

I guess it’s a good idea to save money and energy. But, what is the US saving there money for I wonder?

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Jane May said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:03 pm

I dunno. How the US saves that much by changing time 3 weeks earlier is beyond me.

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Kenny said on March 11th, 2007 at 3:45 pm

Bush signed the bill :) Nuff said.

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Saman Sadeghi said on March 12th, 2007 at 12:40 pm

Because people are more productive during the day - or something like that….

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James Britton said on March 11th, 2007 at 10:59 am

This will not save any money according to two researchers in Berkely, CA. http://www.physorg.com/news92674964.html
They suggest that people will just shift more energy use to the morning since it will be darker longer in the morning. Daylight Saving Time is completely out of date in our modern society and there is much debate as to the actual savings of money.

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Jane May said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

Wasn’t it implemented originally for the agrucultural system so that farmers would maximize the daylight harvesting their crops??? I think I remember a history class talk about something like that…Show’s how much I remember right :wink:

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Saman Sadeghi said on March 12th, 2007 at 12:44 pm

That’s what I remember hearing too.

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Erik said on March 11th, 2007 at 11:00 am

How the heck will it save $47 billion? Interesting…

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Marc said on March 11th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

Energy savings. We use less energy when it’s light out. This gives us more time in the daylight. That’s what the estimates are based upon.

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Hawaii SEO said on March 11th, 2007 at 11:11 am

No… Nothing changes in Hawaii.

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Tyler said on March 11th, 2007 at 11:12 am

Windows had a patch for this (autoupdates) so most people’s machines should be fine with it.

Linux machines might need to be updated to reflex the early time change.

My blackberry had a patch applied to it wirelessly so that’s cool.

We get an extra hour of daylight. We have to wake up earlier. And we don’t really need DST because the farmers are more efficient now a days :)

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Jane May said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

That explains my TREO since it’s powered by Windows.

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Jason Spence said on March 11th, 2007 at 3:02 pm

Only Windows XP and Server 2003 have updates supplied by Microsoft. The others need manual intervention by an IT person. That’s what I’ve been doing at work for the past week. We have over 2000 pc’s I had to fix.

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David said on March 11th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

My computers all changed times by themselves..

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Saman Sadeghi said on March 12th, 2007 at 12:47 pm

So true! I think it funny that the media is blowing this out of proportion (as usual) - “the next Y2K!”

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lyndonmaxewell said on March 11th, 2007 at 11:27 am

I glad I live somewhere near the equator. Not that I have to worry about it at all.. :grin:

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Jane May said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

Must be war where you are. Where are you?

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Jane May said on March 12th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

Sorry, I meant WARM…

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Matthew said on March 11th, 2007 at 11:44 am

thats a lot of savings, i still havent fixed the clocks

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Colin Dean said on March 11th, 2007 at 11:50 am

I fully believe that daylight savings time is one of the most horribly-contrived ideas to grace the mind of man. Why can we not just bite the bullet and accept the nature of nature?

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Marc said on March 11th, 2007 at 12:15 pm

Our 24 hour clock has nothing to do with nature at all. We’re altering a contrived system with another contrived system. If we rolled the way nature rolled, we wouldn’t be using clocks at all.

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Marc said on March 11th, 2007 at 12:14 pm

“will save $47 billion in the next four years.”

Which was significantly offset by IT support costs due to the mass of OSes out there that didn’t have the “simple patch” that people on TV were talking about.

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Jane May said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:01 pm

I just replaced my TREO 650 phone this past week and thought I was going to have to download an update for the new time. Well, that was according to the Verizon Customer Services person I spoke to. But I didn’t have to do anything and it worked out. This freed up some time for me to comment on your site John :P

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Saman Sadeghi said on March 12th, 2007 at 12:49 pm

Don’t all phones auto-update the time from the cell towers these days?

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Matt said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:52 pm

I woke up and changed my clocks then got on the computer to check my site and… WTF it was down. Found out that GoDaddy.com didn’t handle the time change that well, all most all of their hosted sites where down I think. PCworld ran an article about a guy that new all this was going to happen.
the article

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David said on March 11th, 2007 at 3:26 pm

hmm…I didn’t notice my site being down, but then, I kinda slept in a bit this morning..haha..

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Matt said on March 11th, 2007 at 4:06 pm

ha ha yeah, they were fixed by noon for me and i don’t think this hit everyone but i do think it did hit most.

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David said on March 12th, 2007 at 9:32 am

Actually, looking at the hourly breakdown of my stats, it looks like it was never down. So I guess I got lucky..

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Matt said on March 11th, 2007 at 1:55 pm

oh yeah, alot of people over at DP forums were saying that if you have godaddy as a host you can ask for a discount now because they advertise 99.9% uptime. if this works for anyone let me know!

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Hannes Johnson said on March 11th, 2007 at 2:23 pm

We don’t have DST here in Iceland - so I don’t have to change all my clocks. :grin:

But people have been talking about maybe implementing DST in the near future…

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Ryan said on March 11th, 2007 at 2:27 pm

Yeah the whole time thing is getting me messed up today.

Crazy US govt!

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Matthew said on March 11th, 2007 at 2:32 pm

We are switching our usual time this year from GMT to BST (British Summer Time) on the 25th March. I doubt there will be much summer again this year :grin: Maybe they should call it Tippical English Weather (TEW).

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Aris said on March 11th, 2007 at 2:36 pm

I’m still using an old Nokia and it doesn’t pick up the clock signal automatically when I move into different time zone. Yesterday, it showed an hour difference with the local time here in Miami, since I came from Central time zone, but now it’s two hours difference due to DST. I will adjust it when I get home tomorrow so I only need to do it once. (Yeah, big deal! :lol: )

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David said on March 11th, 2007 at 3:28 pm

I remembered to change all my clocks except for my old cell phone, which I use for an alarm…so…I woke up an hour later than planned…oops!!

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Dave Starr said on March 11th, 2007 at 4:15 pm

As already noted, highly developed and intelligent countries such as Japan, China, even my dear littlePhilippines home plus the great state of Arizona are all smart enough not to buy into this claptrap … 47 billion is indeed a dream-world figure. And, when I lived in the US and had kids in school I hated this nonesense … thye have to go to school in the dark that much sooner. It’s a safety issue. The only place any money could be saved is for late sleepers who don’t have a job and who can squeeze in more golf in the afternoons. Bless all of you still stuck in the mess, I set my clocks once and forget them.

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John said on March 13th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

The candy industry is happy now that daylight savings time now ends after Halloween. Also, the Navajo Nation (in Arizona) do use daylight savings time.

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Ed said on March 11th, 2007 at 4:40 pm

Forget $47bn savings and extra ploughing time for farmers, this is America we are talking about, and corporate America is missing a trick with this DST nonsense.

Pharmaceutical ageing cream manufacturers need to put their weight behind a lobby to move the clocks forward by a year! That way they can legitimately claim that their users look younger than they are. Sales of cream, and fashion items are just 2 examples of product sales that would sky rocket from the ensuing feel good factor.

And roughly a million people would get an extra birthday this year, which would generate additional spending on gifts and parties. Why did no one else think of this radical DST policy?

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kwandom said on March 11th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

None in Hong Kong.

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kenny said on March 11th, 2007 at 10:32 pm

Everyone change their batteries in their smoke detectors? :idea:

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Saman Sadeghi said on March 12th, 2007 at 12:51 pm

Nope, I forgot to! Thanks for the reminder!!

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derrich said on March 12th, 2007 at 8:01 am

I had to patch just about every electronic device I have. Blackberry DLST FTW!!!

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cat said on March 13th, 2007 at 11:06 am

Although I’m commenting from the UK at this time, I’m a resident of Bangkok.

Thailand does not go forward, or back. Neither does Brunei, Singapore, the Island of Borneo, pretty much anywhere near the equator.

We are stable.

c

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Marc said on March 13th, 2007 at 12:57 pm

Man I’m still struggling with the change… My PDA isn’t patched. On the bright side, I was an hour early rather than an hour late for one appointment today.

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Rob O. said on March 13th, 2007 at 8:50 pm

I have a better name for this… Maybe we should call it Daylight Scam Time since it seems like DST is more about increasing consumerism than energy conservation.

And what of the tremendous energy & money spent gearing up for this debacle?

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Mark Robinson said on March 16th, 2007 at 8:05 am

Apparently more accidents happen on the Monday following the change to DST. Some useful trivia for you.

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