Coping with the Time Change
Coping with the time change used to mean remembering to set the clocks ahead an hour in the spring and back an hour in the fall, and waiting for our bodies to adjust to the shift in meal and sleep times, but this year we have a whole new dimension to deal with.
When I first heard about the government decision to start daylight savings time three weeks earlier, my only thought was "That will be different." I was therefore amazed to read the article in Saturday’s Hamilton Spectator entitled A time of upheaval - ‘People will be outraged they weren’t warned.’ The article began comparing the current situation to Y2K when everyone was worried about what was going to happen to their computers. I smugly laughed and thought "What’s the big deal? Either your computer knows about the time changes and adjusts itself, or it doesn’t, and you change it manually." I could see how it would be more complicated for large organizations with schedules affecting thousands of people, such as airlines and hospitals, but didn’t see it as an issue for one-person operations like mine.
Then I booted up today and found that some of my appointments had changed times. Whether I fixed them on my desktop PC or my pocket PC, they ended up wrong on the other device. I realized it probably had to do with the time change, but figured I would just have to live with it for three weeks. Then I remembered that Saturday’s article provided helpful links, so I pulled it out of the recycling bag, went to the appropriate place on the Microsoft site, followed a few simple instructions, and now I’m not only back in action, I’ve updated to the latest version of Active Sync, which is something I probably should have done some time ago.
If you’re having any problems with your computer calendar today, here are the links from the Spectator article:
PC users: http://support.microsoft.com/dst2007
Macintosh users: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305056
Palm Pilot users: http://www.palm.com/us/support/downloads/dst.html
BlackBerry users: http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007
