Spring forward

I was surprised to discover that tonight we in the US lose an hour, when Daylight Saving Time starts; somehow I thought that was the last Sunday in April rather than the first. And starting next year, it'll be the second Sunday in March. (In the EU, it's apparently the last Sunday in March, so I guess y'all Europeans did the changeover last weekend.)

A Daylight Saving Time page reminds people to check their smoke detectors twice a year; DST switchover days are convenient times for that. I should not only check mine but install the ones that I've got lying around; they're active, just not attached to walls or ceilings.

I've been regularly up 'til or past 2 a.m. lately, but if I do that tonight, it'll suddenly be 3 a.m. Luckily, I'm pretty sleepy already, so I think I'll go to bed shortly and sleep through the lost hour.

Amusingly, my server has already made the switch (it's normally three hours later than here, but is currently four hours later), so when MT did its time shift to set the timestamp for this entry to be in my timezone, it shifted the new DST time. The upshot of which is that if I hadn't re-set it by hand, this entry's timestamp would've been an hour off. I'm guessing that's a bug in some time-related Perl library (or else in MT's code), but it's probably so rarely an issue that it doesn't matter much.

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