[General
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08 March, 2010 14:55
...and this just in: Groupstupid fraks up AGAIN!!
Mail from ICTS on Friday 5th:
Enough said.Dear UCT staff and students,
Daylight Saving Time (DST) is the system of setting clocks one or two hours ahead of standard time so that sunrise and sunset occur at a later hour, thus artificially moving a period of daylight to the evening hours. South Africa does not use this system and the DST setting is centrally de-activated on the GroupWise server at UCT.
This deactivation of DST did not flow down to all GroupWise users [! how surprising! - Ret.] and as a result some people’s calendars will switch to DST at the end of March. If you are affected, a once-off configuration change is required.
08/03/2010, 15:11
"thus artificially moving a period of daylight to the evening hours"...? Huh? Has that person actually lived through DST?
What it means is - in March, the government steals an hour of your life, by pretending it's an hour earlier than it really is. And then, sometime around October, they give it back to you, and you get to sleep in an hour extra and then go back to how it used to be. It's like small-scale jetlag for the air-shy.
Why they have to do it that way is beyond me - it would make for more sense to operate on "summer business hours" or "winter business hours" the way university libraries have term-time hours and vac hours... but someone somewhere decided it would be more fun to mess with people's circadian rhythms on a large scale, and the dumb citizens of those countries agreed to it!!
05/05/2010, 17:48
I know that they've had quite a few debates on DST in the States, and nobody seems to have worked out a proper system yet!
While it's sometimes nice to see the sun out at 9pm, the phenomenon goes away relatively quickly. DST seems to be one of those things that you either love or hate.
Cheers!
-Booker