Ramblings on IT

Good grief, Charlie Brown. Printers, alarm systems, and whatever else that doesn’t behave properly with the “NEW” daylight savings rules is just another thing to make the Monday after ‘springing forward’ more exciting.

It’s nice to be able to kick the kids outside after dinner to play because there’s actually some daylight left (and that’s almost enough to make today worth the grief). Unfortunately, in a lot of ways, the new DST rules have caused more issues with my time than Y2K ever did – Y2K happened once – DST changes happen twice a year.

So alarm systems installed before the changes in 2007 most likely don’t behave correctly, and never will, requiring manual changes (thanks DSC et al). Network printers, on the other hand, SHOULD be able to be programmed to correctly work with the new dates (DST starts 2 a.m., 2nd Sunday in March, and ends @ 2 a.m. 1st Sunday in November).

So how ‘new’ are these rules? Try March 2007 – a full 2 years ago. And why am I posting about this?

Well, a client with 2 Ricoh Aficio 3035 printers doesn’t have a DST setting available for lowly IT people to turn on. So I called Ricoh, and they sent a tech onsite, who told the onsite staff he didn’t want to turn on DST until after the first Sunday in April.

Huh?

So I spoke with the guy – apparently, ‘head office’ hadn’t yet sent out a memo that daylight savings dates had changed.

Good grief, indeed.