There has been a lot of buzz in the news in the past week or so regarding a change in Daylight Saving Time. For the past twenty years, DST has started on the first Sunday of April, but as a provision of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, it will change to the second Sunday of March, which in 2007 is this Sunday, March 11.
For people in the tech community, this change is not as simple as turning a clock forward one hour. Since so many computer systems depend on time, the change means late hours for programmers like me so our users can sleep easy knowing that a computer glitch won’t make the users of their applications late for any appointments next week. Since over 15 million people across the globe depend on Plaxo to store and organize their address books and calendar data, we have spent the past couple weeks working to make our system configurations are in ship-shape and we will stay posted next week in the event that any DST-related problems arise.
Many people are reminded of Y2K craze that hit the nation a few years ago. Some of you may be delighted by the fact that you may have another chance to justify the bomb shelter you built 8 years ago, which by now has become merely a storage room for Beanie Babies, VCRs, Ricky Martin albums, and other items that have become obsolete since the dawning of the new millennium. For the rest of you, I think it is safe to say we do not have to worry about a nuclear holocaust so much as our microwave clocks being off by an hour on Sunday, along with all other appliances which have not been programmed to deal with the change.
You may be thinking "What else can I do to prepare for the new DST law?" Most home computers will be updated automatically to deal with the change. Windows users can visit this page which will walk you through a process to confirm your system’s DST integrity. Other than that, see that those you work with are aware of the change by confirming your appointments. So make sure to remind your friends, families, and coworkers that some of their electronic devices might be "misbehaving" and for the ones who don’t use Plaxo, remind them not to miss any appointments ;).
Update: Those of you who are using Outlook may have noticed that some of your recurring calendar events were off by an hour this morning. This has nothing to with Plaxo -- it's a known Outlook bug (they store hard-coded version of the DST rules upon event creation, so old recurring events will have the wrong DST rules). Microsoft has released a tool that finds and fixes these events. You can download it here.
--Glenn Dixon, HipCal Engineer
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Hi,
I've filled-in your survey today, funny you ask only closed questions: are you not interested by your customer's opinions?
I am a premium customer and I really like Plaxo. What I don't like is that my contacts don't find it easy to update their details, either because you only support American English or, more importantly, because you are almost forcing people to download the Outlook toolbar. The previous way, an html link to an address update form worked better.
Ludovic,
We have spent the last several months making Plaxo global and are getting ready to launch it in several languages. If you would like to tell us more about your experience and specific needs, please write to our "international" alias (I think you can figure out the email :) and your message will come straight to me. Thanks,
Regina
I updated my outlook to correct for DST on both computers I use and now some appointments are off (using plaxo) by two hours! Yikes! How do I fix this problem w/out changing all my appointments?