an inauspicious beginning
For the last few days I’ve been living on Perth time, trying to out-fox the upcoming jet lag with the help of a clock widget set to Australia/Perth — but something isn’t adding up.
When I double-checked my flights, my math was always an hour off. And I slowly realized that when I used the world clock web sites, I got a different answer than when I used the OS X widget.
It turns out — I could not have dreamed this up — that in late November the Western Australia parliament passed a bill providing for a three-year trial of daylight saving time — starting twelve days later.
I like DST as much as the next guy — probably much more, in fact, because I prefer to have more light at the end of the day — but this is completely insane. With just 12 days’ notice, every device with a clock required an urgent patch, and needless to say neither Mac OS nor my blackberry made the cut.
Lesson 1: the WA parliament is a house of baboons.
Christopher Blizzard said,
January 22, 2007 @ 18:41
I hope none of those baboons have to renew your visa!
janice said,
January 23, 2007 @ 01:02
I’m going to have to share this entry with my work mates. It’s just too perfect: we’ve been fielding problems regarding overly timezone sensitive (or insensitive, depending on your point of view) bits of PIM software.
It’s probably just a coincidence that the latest descriptions of issues include Australian zones. Or maybe not.
James said,
January 27, 2007 @ 03:38
Amusing quotes from the WA parliament: http://housesandmotions.blogspot.com/
phik » the end of daylight saving said,
March 27, 2007 @ 16:58
[...] Perth is a bit of an odd city, and Western Australia an odd state; nowhere has this been more apparent than in the daylight saving debate. I already wrote about how parliament botched the introduction of DST, and it’s been nothing but media-stirred controversy the entire time I’ve been here. [...]