EST to EDT

2009-03-08 10:51:03.000 – Steve Welsh,  IT Observer

Daylight savings time started today. This convention of advancing clocks forward an hour in the spring is used to benefit retailing and sports but on the downside it causes problems for farmers and other activities tied to the sun. Well the climatic data we collect up here at the observatory is tied to the sun so we don’t advance our clocks.

This causes me a couple of problems. Firstly I never know what time it is – is that “obs time” (Eastern Standard Time – EST) or “valley time” (Eastern Daylight Time – EDT)? Secondly it also confuses our computers, and being the IT guy up here at the moment, I ended up spending several hours this morning fixing local settings and database scripts that somehow managed to reference EDT instead of EST. You may have noticed our web server displayed a “no data” message for a while this morning – we’ll we had data it was just trying to access data for one hour in the future. Confused? – well I sure was! I wish daylight savings time would go away like it has in many other countries that finally figured out it was just not worth it – after all midday should be the time the sun is at it’s highest point in the sky.

On a side note I’d like to mention that the second group of German students made it down safely yesterday. We are now only six people on the summit quite a change from the twenty we had yesterday at this time (EST).

Steve Welsh,  IT Observer