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January 24, 2007

A new Y2K bug?

From the IT person for my department:


Congress changed Daylight Savings Time from the first Sunday of April
(1st) to the second Sunday in March (11th).

This is new, many computers, Palm Pilots, Blackberries, cell phones and
software may not yet be equipped to handle this change.

We are beginning to run into trouble with scheduling events in the
Outlook calendar between March 11th and April 1st. Depending on which
computer you use to look at the event you may see the event occur an
hour earlier than you had intended.

If you notice that any of your devices display a meeting at the
incorrect time let me know. I will work with you and my colleagues in
Wharton Computing to fix things so the correct time is displayed.

I would recommend that for any appointment you put into an electronic
calendar for this time that you include the time of the appointment in
the subject of the appointment. Rather than scheduling a meeting titled
"Meeting with Lowell" you should schedule a meeting titled "12 noon
meeting with Lowell."

You may also want to keep a close eye on your home video recording
devices, Airplane / train tickets, Concert tickets, etc. to avoid any
surprises.


Quite an interesting unintended consequence of the daylight-savings change (which, as I understand it, was done to save on energy usage). It shows just how brittle some aspects of our life can become as we rely increasingly on machines.

Posted by Kevin Werbach at January 24, 2007 7:19 AM

Comments

That's a really interesting development. I'm the technology reporter for the Daily Pennsylvanian, I'd like to hear more about this issue. Possibly around March 11th, we can run a story about this.

Posted by: albert sun [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 30, 2007 12:07 AM

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