Hi there.
Just a reminder that tonight most of the US goes back on that dreaded Daylight Saving Time. So set your clocks forward one hour.
Just what I need…one less hour of sleep. * grin *
Oh and my web log still exists. It migrated to http://kathodavid.malibulist.com/. I have had a couple of comments but I have also had people tell me that their bookmark doesn’t work any more.
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Don’t remind me. I’m not opposed to the concept of ‘Daylight Savings Time’, but I’m one of those who was quite ticked off when our [Canadian] government decided to change the dates it started and stopped. This was due, you see, to the fact that the U.S. was doing so.
When people, such as myself, enquired as to why the government felt obligated to follow suit, we were told “well, we have to, don’t you see, they’re our biggest trading partner”.
To which some of us replied “Uh, and we, as well as they have multiple time zones anyway, so what would another hour difference make? Besides, our second largest trading partner, Japan, doesn’t even HAVE Daylight Savings Time and that hasn’t hurt our trading patterns. For that matter one of our Western provinces doesn’t either and they’re not suffering for it.”
To which the government came back with “Well, the U.S. is doing it, so we’re doing it. Just accept it.”
*sigh* Remind me again why we bother having the Canadian flag flying over our Parliament buildings … I forget.
As it is, I’m not sure why they refer to the winter months as “Standard Time” any more since this so-called ‘standard’ now only lasts about four months as opposed to eight for “Daylight Savings”.
I don’t know if it is just me, but ever since the migration to the new site, the feed that I get on Google Reader doesn’t work for me. I have to access the site manually.
Update your RSS feed. The current feed is at http://www.peterdavid.net/index.php/feed/rss/
Am I the ONLY one who likes the new look?
ANYWAY–I work overnights, and I work all weekend, so I had to go in an hour early last night and not one clock in the place matched. It was amusing, for thirty seconds.
As I said on Kath’s site…
One day I’m gonna track down the guy that came up with this stupid thing and slap the stupid out of him.
And no, I don’t care if he is dead. I wanna slap him anyhow. Yes, I hate it that much. I really hate it that much about this time of the day when, rather being bright eyed and bushy tailed, I’m ready to fall asleep at the wheel if i go out.
I hate, hate, hate, HATE this stupid garbage with the clocks.
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“Am I the ONLY one who likes the new look?”
No, I like it. The only thing I didn’t like before was trying to get to the site. Even if I delete by old bookmark in my MSN favorites and make a new one I just get a server error message. Firefox works or I can direct type it, but that’s pretty much it.
Oh, and my mistake prone self misses the preview function. Hëll, even with the thing I was a typo machine…
admin,
I did update my feed. It updates just fine, but when I click the link to the titles to access the blog, it just leads to this URL “http://75.126.28.154/” which redirects automatically to Google.
Ah, you bailed on LJ Kathleen?
Nope. I’m still there as Puppetmaker40.
I was addressing the people who use the malibu address for the RSS feed.
The previous Reply was written by me but attributed to Peter for some unknown reason.
Kath
StarWolf, you seem to be ignoring the key point. We don’t share time zones with Japan. I’m fairly sure that’s the one and only reason we changed DST start and end dates along with the US.
Conor E – Tell that to Saskatchewan which doesn’t have DST, or Newfoundland whose time zone is half an hour off anyone else’s. It doesn’t seem to bother them.
Concerning the new design of our blog/website:
1) took 20 minutes to figure out how to leave a comment… it’s not obvious
2) lot of wasted screen real estate with such a small (horizontally) non-resizable text area — have the horizontal space is faded background graphic… whooppee..
3) too much emphasis on eye candy instead of efficient and quick presentation of text material (ironic for a writer)
4) loads very slowly, even without the “comix” thing that slowed down your last design quite a bit
Nice try, but I think the overall design is a step backward from functionality and usability, and not as much of a positive reflection of Peter’s amazing talents as it should be.
Just an FYI… Mark
I think it’d be nice to have a link again to the last x number of comments. Although, imbedded replies are just going to make it that much more difficult to read only the newest comments, as you’ll have to scan all comments to find new ones. With the number of responses the SD entry got, it’d be impossible to keep track.
Oh, and I hate Daylight Saving. We already have it 8 months out of the year, why not just make it permanent already so we can stop dicking around of our sleep patterns?
I like the look of this design a lot more than I did the old one. I also find it loading several times as fast as the old one did. Our mileage varies, I suppose…
I just want to know where we’re keeping all this daylight we’re saving! And can I get some of that in the middle of winter, when it’d come in handy?
Kath,
Don’t worry, you’ll get your hour back in November.
The history of daylight savings time can be found here:
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.php
The Standard Time Act of 1918 also established daylight savings time, which was repealed the following year. And then became a local concern.
So it appears there’s always been some contention about it.
It was re-established during World War II, after which its use varied.
The dates became standardized in 1966, and I suspect the reason we still have it today (albeit with slightly different start and stop dates) is mostly a matter of habit.
Presumably during the war years, we used daylight savings time so as to have more hours of sunlight and thus not expend as much energy on electricity to power lights and such. To some degree, I imagine that’s still an impetus to have it; but I don’t know how effective it is as a means of saving energy. Like I said, it could be mostly habit at this point.
I seem to remember learning as a kid that it also gave farmers more hours of daylight. But that probably had more of an impact when we were primarily an agrarian nation.
Jonathan, for what it’s worth, in 1974, during the “energy crisis”, daylight savings time began in January.
As to the changes to the site, I too wouldn’t mind seeing a return of the preview function as well as the “view last 300 (or whatever number you choose) comments” option. On the other hand, I neither found it difficult to figure out how to leave a comment or to read the most recent comments in a thread. For the latter, you obviously click on the recent comments sidebar or jump to the last page of entries. It’s then a matter of remembering (especially in the longer threads, at least for me) which was the last comment read, and then continuing from there.
I can understand PAD wanting to showcase the various books and comics he’s written, but I think Mark may have a point about the eye candy. Maybe if the text area were slightly wider and/or the background images were done as a watermark that appeared behind the text. (I note you can see it behind the areas around the text, but not the text boxes themselves).
But then maybe you tried that without success.
Jerry,
Off topic, but did we ever get around to comparing notes on good audio production (e.g. old time radio)? A matter brought up on a thread in 2007?
Rick