What time is it anyway?
If a man with one watch knows what time it is,
and a man with two watches is never sure, what about the guy with 15
time-keeping devices?
Today we went off daylight savings time. I'm
grateful for the extra hour of sleep, of course, but then I had to find all the
clocks in the house and adjust the time. I think I counted 15 clocks,
enumerated here in the order I found them: master bedroom (his), master bedroom
(hers), master bathroom, shower clock radio, guest bedroom, thermostat, kitchen,
family room, vcr, tv, pool pump, watch, digital camera, sprinkler system, car.
Whew. [Update: forgot the answering
machine.]
The computers in the house
seem to get it right these days, adjusting to DST changes automatically. (I
think Linux and WindowsXP on my dual-boot PC disagree about how the time is
stored in the battery-backed RTC. One thinks GMT and one thinks local time or
something, so I have to manually adjust one or the other after a DST switch. I
should figure out where that setting is so I wouldn't have to keep doing that
manually.) The TiVo handles the time change itself too, but TiVo is just a
computer running Linux after
all.
Shouldn't there be a better way to
handle this? I'm sure the Linux guys would get aroused by the thought of
running Linux on my pool pump, but that doesn't feel like the way to go. The
cellular phone companies are broadcasting the current time over the cellular
network so your cell phone knows what time it is, but I don't think my house
thermostat control needs a cellular receiver in it. Hmm, most of the
time-keeping devices are plugged into the power grid--maybe we could get the
electric companies to broadcast the current time over the power
lines?
Or better yet, maybe we should
just ditch the whole idea of springing forward and falling back every year. Are
we really saving any daylight here, or are we just moving it around between
accounts that pay no interest?
Posted: Sun - October 26, 2003 at 10:59 AM