Geek

I finally bit the bullet and picked up a new iMac today as an upgrade from my PowerBook G4. I’m not disappointed at all! Apple has done well.

Daylight Saving Time has lots of reasoning for and against it. What I don’t really understand is what is the real benefit? Energy use is cited as the big motivation behind it but the reduction in costs from using less lighting seems outweighed by increased cooling and gasoline consumption from being more active during that extra hour of sunlight. And it’s complex – who’s on DST and who isn’t? You don’t know unless you memorize a pretty big chart. Now we’ve got the US shifting DST a week on each end to further complicate things and not even the US has DST in every state… WTF?

All in all, I think DST is a giant pain in the ass. I wish we’d drop the whole thing and be done with it. Pick a standard and go with it – I really don’t care if noon is when the sun is in the middle of the sky. Heck, let’s all just use UTC... there’s a reason why aviation, weather, and military use it to be absolutely sure they all know what time it is without having to figure out timezones and DST. That sure would make working in a global economy a lot less confusing.

Don’t forget to set your^* clocks back tonight as DST ends at 2am November 4th.

^* if USA’s DST applies where you live

Learn how to ask smart questions.

The OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project is gaining momentum with the latest development being an offer to buy an OLPC for a child and get one free for yourself. There will be a window from November 12 to November 26 for this offer and the deal will cost $399. I’ve seen the OLPCs at OSCON and BarCampRDU and they are neat little machines running 100% open source software and aiming for a hardware cost under $100 to bring computing and internet access to the world’s children. It’s a cool project on many levels.

The donated computers are tax deductible and I’m sure there are local schools that wouldn’t turn away a free OLPC after you check it out, although I may just donate some cash. It’s not like I need another computer to distract me any more than all the other ones floating around here do…