If you live in a U.S. Daylight Savings region, did you remember to set your clock forward? Did you get all of them?

I just wish people would stop mucking with Daylight Savings. Professionally I work on software for a global market. If somebody logs in from say Australia or Mexico, they need to see their correct local time on message postings and stuff like that. But it's impossible. We have compiled software which tries its best to apply the local conventions to a generic timestamp, which is difficult in itself. We have more code devoted to getting the time right than we do for the rest of the product combined. Everybody has different local conventions. Australia has two time zones for part of the year and five time zones for the rest. A couple of these don't move the clock by an hour, but instead by a half hour. Then last year some idiot decided that because of the Olympics they would create a special timezone with its own rules just for Sydney - and just for one year. The Australians were hopping mad that we didn't know about this and have it built-in to our web pages in advance. Mexico decided that this year they wouldn't track the U.S., but instead changed their Daylight Savings date to another day (as they did five years ago in order to match the U.S.). All they are doing is making sure that lots of programmers throughout the world have work to do. But that only affects products which are in development. Anything that was released before they changed the rules is going to have the incorrect time.

And all of this came about because some people decided they didn't want their kids walking to school in the dark. Hate to state the obvious, but why couldn't they change the time school started? But no, they decided to change time itself. And then left it to every country and region and whatever to come up with its own rules on how much to change it and when. And yes, I understand how it got out of control. If they changed school hours, it might cause a problem for working parents if their hours weren't changed as well. But still the cure is much worse than the disease if you fast forward to the present and see the mess we got ourselves in. It wouldn't be so bad if they just changed it and left it alone, but now that everybody has it in their head that they can change time at will, they keep doing it - and this is a problem in an increasingly automated world. First there's the software aspect I mentioned. Second is that you have to try and remember what sequence of buttons changes the time on every clock you own. The alarm clock, your watch, the VCR and TV, the answering machine, the microwave, the car, the coffee maker, the thermostat, the sprinkler controller, and on and on. (Palm Pilots and cell phones and even your camera - geez this gets ridiculous). The programmers that created these devices didn't want to put up with the hassle of changing rules, so they make you figure it out. I changed 17 clocks today, and I'm not an anomoly. I had to dig into obscure tech manuals to get them all. How many did you change? I know for a fact that I missed at least three, which will come back to haunt me later. Which did you forget?