Daylight Suck Time

Ugh, who’s bright idea was it to move the beginning of Daylight Saving Time up to the middle of March? Oh yeah, that’s right, our friends in Congress had the “brilliant” idea to extend DST so that it now gobbles up eight months of the year.

Expanding DST has hit the youth of America pretty hard. Lawmakers might think an extra hour of daylight for trick-or-treating is a good thing, but for kids, it pretty much sucks. Who above the age of six goes trick-or-treating in the daytime? And this year, the early beginning date is stealing an hour of spring break away from most students. Not to mention groggy conventioneers. 

I’m not sold on DST in general. I think that any benefits gained in the evening are cancelled out by increased costs in the morning (and there’s numbers to back that up). The fact that some areas opt out of it entirely, like Arizona and Hawaii, creates a hodgepodge of time discrepancies. Perhaps most importanty, it seems like we’re just messing with things for no good reason.

And no matter how smart we like to think we are, there are people who just don’t get it. Trust me, you may be aware that the clocks needed to be reset this morning, but there’s a good 30% of the population that’s trucking around right now thinking that it’s an hour earlier than it actually is. After years of working at movie theaters, I’ve seen it first hand. People will be late to a show, late to church and late to who knows what else today. I’m not saying that they have an excuse for their obliviousness, I’m just saying that it exists.

I’m actually somewhat nervous about the beginning of DST this year because I’m not home to change all the clocks. As our resident person with OCD, I always take great care to synchronize all of our families’ watches and clocks with a hand-held radio controlled atomic clock. My absence means that The Wife, a person who’s okay with her bedside and car clocks being anywhere between 10-15 minutes fast, is now in charge of making sure our timepieces are updated. I shudder to think what kind of chaos I’ll find when I get home Tuesday night.

And no, my objections to DST aren’t just about losing an hour of sleep in the spring. Getting that hour back in the fall doesn’t make it any better. We haven’t seen any tangible energy savings, so why do we keep on doing it?

Getting ready for Day Three

I had another breakfast of champions here at the hotel this morning. Instead of the world’s bitterest orange juice, though, I opted for sweet, sweet cranberry juice instead. It was a good decision.

I failed to mention yesterday something that I’ve found odd. Adobe distributed thousands of little Chinese food take-out boxes in our convention bags on Friday with little fortune cookies inside. The idea is that you take the fortune inside and enter it into a web site they’ve set up as part of some promotion. 

Great, brilliant. The only problem is that they haven’t set up the site yet. As of Sunday morning, 48 hours after they started passing these things out, this is what you see when you go the address. Perhaps Adobe should have been nominated at yesterday’s Suxorz panel.