Posted on October 27th, 2008 by David Bayon
Daylight savings, the iPhone way
The PC Pro office on a Monday afternoon in press week isn’t Number One on my list of favourite locations to be, so it’s no surprise I found my gaze wandering towards the window. A depressingly black sight stared back at me, evidence that winter is almost here to wither away what little pigment remains in my skin.
But the fact that it was only five o’clock took a few minutes to strike me as odd – because on Friday it wasn’t even nearly dark when we stumbled out of the office at six.
Turns out the clocks changed over the weekend. Now, I’m sure you all knew that, otherwise you’d have turned up to work an hour early.
Wouldn’t you?
I ask because, despite being blissfully unaware of the clock change, I turned up to work on time this morning. I was woken as usual by the alarm on my iPhone, pressed snooze a few more times than was necessary, then lurched past a PC clock, a DVD player clock and a set-top box clock, not one of which indicated anything was amiss.
I then struggled through a full day of work in front of a laptop and several test machines, before absent-mindedly mentioning that, gosh, isn’t it dark out there compared to this time on Friday? At which point I was subjected to a barrage of mockery until a pitch-black six o’clock rolled around to spare me.
I think it’s great that, largely due to the increasing prevalence of internet and wireless connectivity inside them, so many of our time-keeping devices now take the initiative at times like this. They change themselves when they need to and keep our daily routines flowing smoothly regardless of our own forgetfulness.
I just wish they’d tell me about it when they do.
Tags: daylight savings, iphone
Posted in: Random
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5 Responses to “ Daylight savings, the iPhone way ”
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October 27th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
They go to all that efort so you don’t even have to think about it, and you complain you didn’t notice? They can’t win, can they?
October 27th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
You should go back to Win98 then, it required the user to OK the time shift.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:44 am
Yep, computers have been coping with the change for over a decade, although they used to politely inform the user that the time had changed, or it should change, are you sure?
Most of the clocks here and at my girlfriends use the atomic time signal, so they change themselves automatically as well (although the analogue alarm clock next to the bed woke me up when it started whirring away!).
Funnily enough, my non-iPhone mobile also changed itself automatically (Windows Mobile), although it did pop up a little reminder to say that it had changed automatically, and not to make a pratt of myself when I got to the office.
October 28th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
I have to disagree with you that “it’s great that… they change themselves when they need to and keep our daily routines flowing smoothly regardless of our own forgetfulness.” Unfortunately, my government has chosen to follow the poorly-thought-out U.S. policy of arbitrarily altering the DST dates to give the appearance of caring about the environment. So for me, the clock change is not supposed to happen until this upcoming weekend. Since all the technology around me is much smarter than the U.S. government (what isn’t?), I was an hour late for work this Monday.
November 1st, 2008 at 12:24 am
Yes, changing the clocks automatically when required is good news but over the weekend SuSE linux set my desktop clock back one hour, then when I did a bit of work in windows, xp decided to do the same. Marvelous.