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All about DST, and the lack of it...
Nov. 17th, 2011 07:21 pmA comment by LJ friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
velvet_granat—to the effect that "summer time" (aka "daylight saving time") is not observed in her neck of Down Under—got me to thinking a bit more broadly about DST. Specifically, if countries above the equator "spring forward" in spring and "fall back" in the fall, then countries below the equator must do the exact opposite, because the summer–winter cycles are opposite each other in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.
That would mean that the time in two cities having the same longitude but opposite latitudes would change by two hours, relatively, after a time change. Theoretically.
Then I got to wondering how popular "summer time" is near the equator, because in that region, the day/night ratio remains roughly the same all year round. That, in turn led me to a Wikipedia article that graphically depicted where DST is observed during Northern hemisphere summer (blue) and Southern hemisphere summer (orange):
I was surprised to find how few countries adhere to the change, and my eyebrows rose a tad higher when I noted that Russia apparently no longer observes the time change.
Back in the day, when I worried about telecon support at JSC, the time change never failed to screw up telecon schedules, requiring sides to either show up earlier (on the US side, which already showed up at 7 am) or stay later (on the Moscow side, where staffers were often required to obtain permission to stay past 5 pm). The change also created a perceived need for something called "Decreed Moscow Time" at the Moscow Mission Control Center (basically GMT+3h), which was used by MCC planners and crews aboard the Mir and International Space Stations.
According to the article (confirmed by lenta.ru), Russia is not turning the clock back this fall after having added an hour this past spring. That means that the difference between, say, Houston and Moscow is currently 10 hours, which surely must be playing havoc with telecon scheduling. And although that's no longer my problem, I still acutely recollect those 7 am telecons (for which one was required to show up at 6:45 am) and how worrying about oversleeping caused me to develop a mild sleep disorder—consisting of waking six or seven times—during the night leading up to the telecon.
* * * The rain has sort of trailed off, but not stopped completely. It's cold, too, and our heat doesn't seem to want to come on.
It's been a pretty sedentary day, too. Work came in that kept me busy until about 2 pm, at which time I had tallied fewer than 2000 steps for the day. (Ironically, yesterday, I upped my fitbit weekly step goal from 70,000—which I had been exceeding easily since the beginning of the month—to 100,000. That said, failing to meet the goal is No Big Deal, at least for now.) I am currently just over 7000 steps for the day. If nothing else, this state of affairs underscores my need to start exercising indoors.
On impulse, I again turned my attention to my Backblaze backup stats and they are again squirrely. According to the site, my backup status became current as of sometime in June, and for some reason, nothing has been backed up since.
While this does not reflect the actual state of affairs—all my stuff has been backed up to my home server—it's still an annoyance. And rather than suffer through a once-daily exchange with a support tech whose repertoire of suggested solutions is limited to "turn off your firewall" and "disable your virus scanner," I decided to uninstall the app and then reinstall it, realizing this would mean starting the backup from scratch. And so, the system is now doing exactly that, at a rate of something short of 20 GB per day.
Cheers...
velvet_granat—to the effect that "summer time" (aka "daylight saving time") is not observed in her neck of Down Under—got me to thinking a bit more broadly about DST. Specifically, if countries above the equator "spring forward" in spring and "fall back" in the fall, then countries below the equator must do the exact opposite, because the summer–winter cycles are opposite each other in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres.That would mean that the time in two cities having the same longitude but opposite latitudes would change by two hours, relatively, after a time change. Theoretically.
Then I got to wondering how popular "summer time" is near the equator, because in that region, the day/night ratio remains roughly the same all year round. That, in turn led me to a Wikipedia article that graphically depicted where DST is observed during Northern hemisphere summer (blue) and Southern hemisphere summer (orange):
I was surprised to find how few countries adhere to the change, and my eyebrows rose a tad higher when I noted that Russia apparently no longer observes the time change.
Back in the day, when I worried about telecon support at JSC, the time change never failed to screw up telecon schedules, requiring sides to either show up earlier (on the US side, which already showed up at 7 am) or stay later (on the Moscow side, where staffers were often required to obtain permission to stay past 5 pm). The change also created a perceived need for something called "Decreed Moscow Time" at the Moscow Mission Control Center (basically GMT+3h), which was used by MCC planners and crews aboard the Mir and International Space Stations.
According to the article (confirmed by lenta.ru), Russia is not turning the clock back this fall after having added an hour this past spring. That means that the difference between, say, Houston and Moscow is currently 10 hours, which surely must be playing havoc with telecon scheduling. And although that's no longer my problem, I still acutely recollect those 7 am telecons (for which one was required to show up at 6:45 am) and how worrying about oversleeping caused me to develop a mild sleep disorder—consisting of waking six or seven times—during the night leading up to the telecon.
It's been a pretty sedentary day, too. Work came in that kept me busy until about 2 pm, at which time I had tallied fewer than 2000 steps for the day. (Ironically, yesterday, I upped my fitbit weekly step goal from 70,000—which I had been exceeding easily since the beginning of the month—to 100,000. That said, failing to meet the goal is No Big Deal, at least for now.) I am currently just over 7000 steps for the day. If nothing else, this state of affairs underscores my need to start exercising indoors.
On impulse, I again turned my attention to my Backblaze backup stats and they are again squirrely. According to the site, my backup status became current as of sometime in June, and for some reason, nothing has been backed up since.
While this does not reflect the actual state of affairs—all my stuff has been backed up to my home server—it's still an annoyance. And rather than suffer through a once-daily exchange with a support tech whose repertoire of suggested solutions is limited to "turn off your firewall" and "disable your virus scanner," I decided to uninstall the app and then reinstall it, realizing this would mean starting the backup from scratch. And so, the system is now doing exactly that, at a rate of something short of 20 GB per day.
Cheers...
