Spring Ahead!

At 2:00am tomorrow (Sunday) morning, many of us will move our clocks ahead an hour. Why do I blog about this? Daylight savings time is not some new concept. Ben Franklin mentioned casually mentioned it in a in a humorous letter urging Parisians to save money by getting up earlier to use morning sunlight, thereby burning fewer candles in the evening. He did not directly call it 'Daylight Savings Time', but the insinuation was there.

Daylight Saving Time was instituted in the United States during World War I in order to save energy for war production by taking advantage of the later hours of daylight between April and October. During World War II the federal government again required the states to observe the time change. Between the wars and after World War II, states and communities chose whether or not to observe Daylight Saving Time. In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act which standardized the length of Daylight Saving Time.[1]

The Energy Act of 2005 extended Daylight Savings Time about one month by beginning it about three weeks earlier and lasting about one week longer. This is to go into effect tomorrow at 2am.

Now I'm sure all of you appreciate the history lesson, but are asking yourself why Silver Creek Band Boosters would be addressing this. Because there is an correlation between Daylight Savings Time and your computer. And since your webmaster is a computer guru, I want to make sure this event doesn't play havoc with your system. The solution is simple if you have your Automatic Updates in Windows XP turned on (which I hope that you do). Microsoft already fixed the problem for you. If you don't have Automatic Updates turned on, then Microsoft has a website to help you with the update.

Time on the computer is used by many things. The Windows operating system is designed to automatically update the time for you if you live in a Daylight Savings Time Zone area. Not updating the operating system to automatically coincide with current daylight savings time for your area can be devastating. Appointments can be off if you use a calendar program. File stamps for when files are created or modified would be off. And date/time insert in a word processing program will be wrong. These are just a few of the simple things that can occur by not making sure you have the daylight savings time fix.

So, if you don't want to be running around like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, check and double-check to make sure that your computer has the fix and springs ahead tomorrow!

[1]Daylight Saving Time (Not Daylight "Savings" Time), about.com