Sunday, March 11, 2007

Does Anybody Here Really Know What Time It Is?



I guess it began a few weeks ago when my good friend ABF began complaining that her husband had to work all the time. All the time: like around the clock on his vacation week. He's a computer geek and his company was preparing to deal with the DST issue. For those of you still in the dark--that's this year's rearrangement of Day Light Savings time such that we sprung ahead today, three weeks earlier than the world here in the Eastern Time Zone of the USA usually springs. I'm assuming that psychiatrically this will be for those with Seasonal Affective Disorder prone to winter depressions, and time will tell--sooner rather than later--if spring time manics will be dancing earlier.


I thought about it again when a patient mentioned he was overwhelmed at work--another computer systems guy getting ready for the change.


I didn't think it was about me.


The first hint came yesterday morning when an e-mail arrived from Palm: I had to go their website and do something so my Palm Pilot would remake itself into a properly sync-ed sort of machine. Great.


8:50 AM, the phone rings (it's Saturday and I am not a morning person, please wait until 9, but okay, I was up and drinking coffee). It was my friend Camel (see previous posts), on the way to the office to update her Palm. Did I do this? Did I want to do this together (she lives an hour away, but hey, what are cell phones for). I was off to the hairdresser, then to watch videokid play baseball (like in real life, not on a screen), it would have to wait.


I visited Palm's website. I would have to visit Microsofts website and I might (might?) have to download two updates (no, I don't have the microsoft updates automatically downloaded). It didn't say Which two updates --would that be too much to ask? One was obvious--something to do with DST/2007. Oh, but first I needed to download ActiveX. My screen didn't do what it said to do. I went to the baseball game.


Fastforward: note first that videokid's team won both games of the all-day tournament. Okay, we now have ActiveX. I think the second update was for Outlook to update to 2007. But it wouldn't download and I don't use Outlook.


I returned to the Palm site. It warned me Don't Download This If You Haven't Downloaded the Microsoft Updates. It still wouldn't tell me Which updates. I hit Download. It downloaded. Mission complete?


So I opened my Palm software. Everything looked fine. Oh, except that Mrs. Jones always comes at noon on Friday, and for the next three weeks, it seems she's coming at 1. Huh? In four weeks, once the regular world resumes on the old DST, Mrs. Jones will be resuming her noon appointment. Hmmm, seems everyone shifted an hour later.


I called Camel (her husband is also a computer geek). No answer. No answer either on her emergency life-or-death-line (yes, I called it). I called my husband, which oddly enough through today's technology means that from the third floor of our house in Baltimore, I dialed a number in Philadelphia to reach his blackberry, to ask that he come upstairs to help me (he and the Philadelphia blackberry were on the second floor of the Baltimore house). He was clueless. I called my brother, yet another computer geek, who told me how he'd spent the last 16 hours working on his hard drive. He thought the problem might fix itself at 2 am with the official time change.


"So it will be fine in the morning."


"I give it 50-50."


Great. In the meantime, I didn't hot-sync (Clink will tell you how stressful an experience that is for me anyway).


I woke up this morning at whatever time it was in whatever time zone I live in. I went up to the computer, pleased to see it had set itself to the right time. I fixed the clock on the wall, which oddly enough has a battery and winder. I opened my Palm software on the computer, and you guessed it, Mrs. Jones it still set for 1 on the next three Fridays. In my unsynced Palm handheld, she remains scheduled at noon.


I can't be the only one.

11 comments:

ClinkShrink said...

Poor Dinah. This is what happens when Microsoft takes over Palm. Back in the Palm OS days, you could just tap a couple times on the Palm to reset the date manually. With the switch to the WinCE operating system now we have this. (Does anyone else think that Wince is a wonderfully apt acronym?)

Today I just clicked to update the time manually on my Linux box. No biggie. I'll probably do the same on my Mac desktop when I get enough coffee under my belt to go upstairs and turn it on.

Some things are just better done the non-geek way.

Rach said...

My mac finally converted itself over this morning. My blackberry, ipod, microwave and VCR are totally hopeless.

The solution to this problem was to crawl back into bed this morning.

Anonymous said...

Oddly enough, my calendar book seems to be functioning pretty well. It has these things called "pages" and you just turn one and a whole new week appears. You can turn also back to see what happened in previous weeks. Plus, you can enter notes in different colors and sizes, across days, and even add graphics, depending on your skill level.

There's even this strategy someone taught me; you fold down the corner of a page as the week ends, and then you can automatically open to the current week. It's like magic!

And the neatest part, despite years having past, I can still access the calendars I used in the 70s. That's more than I can say for any 5-1/4" floppy I used in the late 80s.

SEAMONKEY said...

Pages? How quaint.

Steve & Barb said...

I got that Palm notice, also. I use Windoze at work, and -- for the first time in 15 years -- decided to give WinCE a try when my Palm OS Treo died (note, I was using Casio doodads in college and had one of the first Palm Pilots ... when it was actually called the Pilot ... I've since gone Palm III > Palm V > Sony Clie > Treo 600 > Treo 650 > and now Treo 700W).

I started to do the update ActiveX and all and then decided that it was easier to move my Palm up an hour at the appropriate time than to do 4 downloads, etc.

I did this, but, like Dinah, all my appts for the next 2 wks are off an hour. No biggie. BTW, this 700W has crashed almost daily, and a please-wait icon spins for 15 seconds whenever I need to look up the ICD9 code for Toxic Encephalopathy (349.82, I think). I am returning the new Wince device and am going back to Palm OS, with the 700P.

I don't know what ever possessed me, and please stop me if I ever again try to go back to Microsoft.

jcat said...

Time?? almost 22h00...bed time. One of the good things about living in SA is that the closest we get to changing times is thinking about daylight savings every few years and then remembering that an hour of daylight after work does not compensate for getting up in the dark!

Midwife with a Knife said...

OK, I feel like a dummy. I can't figure out how to set my self-setting alarm clocks to the new time today. Ugh.

I haven't taken the time to figure out how to use my Dell Axim yet (I've had it for 6 months. Shows to go you how bad I needed it. :P ). I guess the time thing might be a problem now, but I won't know until I turn it on.

I did feel satisfied at figuring out how to set the digital watch I wear at work.

Why do we persist with this stupid Daylight Savings Time thing anyway? You never actually SAVE any daylight. Its simply a matter of whether we like our daylight at the beginning or at the end of the day. I prefer the end, but I'm flexible.

sophizo said...

These are the times I wish I still lived in Arizona. No day light savings time! Ugh!

Anonymous said...

So this is Camel; in defence of my not answering my life and death line, I was at a basketball game, and couldn't hear the phone go off, in the roaring of the crowd, as the Wizards lost in the last seconds to Stevie's three pointer. That said, I too, despite my download, had all my appointments moved an hour forward, and some of them were oddly flipped. However, my office spouse came in early, and did something magic, and I'm all back to mormal. Life goes on, ecept I owe him a big Latte, I think. I REALLY hate Microsoft!
Camel.

Anonymous said...

EEEEEEkkkkk, My computer geek husband had actually told me that the patches Microsoft were telling people to download were wrong and not working. Perhaps I should have given you his email address. Instead of not being able to get hold of someone on their "life and death" line. Luckily all our stuff converted easily thanks to my geek husband. I hope it works out and besides you are going away anyway. I love you and will miss you abf

Anonymous said...

My blackberry is still stuck in last week's time zone. The question is, "Why haven't I changed it manually?"