Daylight Savings Chaos

It was chaos on Monday here in Sydney. For the very first time, the New South Wales State Government had decided to extend daylight savings a week. Unfortunately I don't think they publicised it very well or thought through the impact, as a lot of computer software that was set to automatically adjust the time was not amended to reflect the change. I saw the result first hand when I went to the client site on Monday morning.

Microsoft quickly released a patch to fix the clock on Windows. However, the patch didn't extend to the Calendar in Microsoft Outlook - so everyone's appointments and meetings were out by an hour.

Apparently even many mobile phones were affected, and phone services, including the Telstra speaking clock. It comes to something when the phone company's speaking clock is an hour wrong!

We don't have such problems in Queensland as the Queensland State Government has so far refused to adopt daylight saving hours. A backwards and stupid decision if you ask me. We're only in Autumn and I'm already getting up in the dark and coming home from work in the dark.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/story/0,25642,23458405-5014239,00.html