I dislike daylight savings time. A lot.

First off, it sucks having to go through an hour ‘jet lag’ twice a year. Second off, just when the sun was coming up in the morning and it was getting easier to ‘rise and shine’ (or in my case, rise and glow dimly) they bump things back an hour so it’s not bright out any more when it’s time to get up. And third, since they messed with the timing for when DST starts and ends, we spend more time in the wrong time zone than we do in the time zone we’re supposed to be in!

Eastern Standard Time, the zone that my location is supposed to be in, now only lasts like 4 or 4.5 months? WTF is up with that? Why even bother for those last couple months? Just frigging change us to the next time zone over and call it a day.

It’s also a pisser when you have friends all over the world. Try and work out the relative times in your head, when it changes twice a year. Got a friend in Australia? When we go forward an hour, they go back an hour. Sometimes they’re 14 hours ahead, sometimes they’re 16 hours ahead. And since our change dates were screwed with, there’s also some time when they’re 15 hours ahead. Friends in Japan? They wisely don’t change their timezones around, but we do, so it changes twice a year. Friends in Europe? They do have DST but not when we do, so once more there’s a bunch of different numbers to try and remember.

Then you have your clocks that automatically adjust. By some coincidence all the clocks in my livingroom automatically change themselves, but the ones in my bedroom don’t. So yesterday I woke up at 9am, was pleased to see I’d slept in a bit… got up, fed the cats, made myself coffee, then sat down in the livingroom and suddenly it was 10:30! WTF?!

Whoever invented this DST BS should be hurt.

Time’s running out just as fast as it can. Again.

Seems like it only just started being 2010 and suddenly the year is 10% over already. It’s like, blink and you’ll miss it.

What happened to January? Vrooom it’s gone!

Someone should do something about this. There ought to be a study. Time’s going too quickly and we need to put the brakes on this before it gets out of control.

So instead of devoting what little energy / functionality I have into something important — like housework, workwork, or that sort of thing — I’ve been using it to muck about with Wordpress & my website.

Odds are, you won’t notice anything different. That’s kind of the point actually.

What I’ve been doing was first, upgraded to the latest version, Wordpress 2.9 was just released recently. Then I have been rewriting most of the files that drive my custom theme. I also scrapped my mobilized plugin, as I’ve changed my theme to dynamically adjust itself depending on whether the viewer is using a mobile / handheld browser or not.

Not that the mobilized plugin had any problems – just that it required a secondary mobilize theme, and I kept forgetting to update that theme when I did anything with the primary theme. So finally I figured, heck with it, I’ll just adapt the main theme so it can serve both fullsize and mobile user agents.

The only visible change actually is that I got rid of the fancy tag-cloud plugin, and started using the normal built-in one. The only real difference there is the tag-cloud words don’t change colour any more. No real reason for the change, just that I felt like eliminating a plugin. I’m down to only 5 plugins now, and two of those are mine.

I could probably offload another one of those into my theme functions, but I haven’t decided yet if I want to do that.

Anyhow – still not focused on the right things. And now I’m wasting time writing about working on the wrong stuff instead of working on the right stuff. This is me paying homage to the Gods of Procrastination.

It’s not fair! I took my cryptospam. I had a rest yesterday. I haven’t had nearly as much extra large extra strong coffees. Why am I still dizzy and befuddled?!

About the only improvement from yesterday is that my eyemuscles have stopped convulsing. But I’m still feeling twitchy and my eyeballs are still itchy. Gawd I hate that!

And another thing – how is it that minutes and hours take forever, but actual weeks and months go by quickly? Something is really messed up with the way time works. Somebody should look into that, do a study.

Getting a voicemail like this: Hello, this is XXXXX, I have some questions about YYYYY please get back to me.

Or getting an email like this: Hello Stephanie, I have some questions about YYYYY please let me know when would be a good time to discuss. Sincerely, XXXXX

Do you see the problem with both of those scenarios? Incase anyone reading this is one of the people who do this, let me tell you the problem.

If you have questions, ask them! Don’t just tell me that you have a question, tell me what the question is!

In either of the scenarios I described above, the person has just wasted some of both of our time. Now I have to write them back or look up their number and call them back, just to I can ask what the hell they wanted to ask me in the first place. Why do people do this? Is it a control thing?

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Just when I was getting used to it being light out when I woke up in the morning, they go and change the time zones on us. Throws my circadian rythms all out of whack, and I have enough trouble sleeping as it is. It’s even worse since they tinkered with the time a year or two ago – now standard time is only like 4 months long and savings time is 8 months? What the hell? Why not just shift everyone by one time zone and call it a day?

I didn’t even know the time had changed this year – the clock in my bedroom updates automagically thanks to the WWV broadcasts, and so does the big clock in my livingroom. The computers all update themselves too. Appearantly so does my cellphone and PDA. So I didn’t know the time had changed till I was talking with my sister and she mentioned it – here I thought I had slept in an extra hour, because when I got up on Sunday it was an hour later than I usually wake. But no it was me getting up at the normal time and the clocks all changing while I’m not looking.

To be fair, they didn’t all change. The teeny clock on my thermostat didn’t, but I never look at it. And the clocks on my stove and microwave are always wrong anyways, so I never look at them either. (The stove always has something whacky going on, like 5 3/8th hours fast or whatever and the microwave is just always…12:00 12:00 12:00..)

Of course, Monday morning I found out that one other clock didn’t get updated – my alarm clock. So I was an hour late getting out of bed — or more accurately, I woke up at exactly the same time as always, it was the rest of the world that was an hour fast. This was a good thing though because I couldn’t sleep Sunday night. Couldn’t sleep last night either – I had some down-time between about 6 and 8pm, then was wide awake till 2am. So even though I remembered to set my alarm clock, I was still an hour late this morning because I was able to sleep through the first hour of noise.

Oh and one other clock that is being obstinate – the clock in my car is *supposed* to automatically update, but it didn’t. So I switched it to manual and set it myself. And 5 minutes later I notice that it has switched itself back to automatica *and* switched itself back to the standard time. Dammit. I know what’s up with it though – it’s running some flavour of windoze and bill-knows-best. So my car will stay on Eastern Standard Time until it feels obliged to change itself.

Personally I’d like to just abolish this whole time change nonsense and be done with it. For that matter, everything’s global anyways, so my 9:00 is less relavent because then you have to coordinate what time zone everyone else is and try and figure it out. Maybe we ought to just all switch to UTC. Just have a standard global time standard that doesn’t bounce around from season to season.

At the sound of the tone, the time will be 14:19 Universal Coordinated Time.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
BEEEEEEEEEP.

12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00
12:00

Just realized that it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. Another long dark stretch where there wasn’t anything fun to talk about. I’m still on the crypto-spam but it’s not doing anything. I thought it might have been, towards the end of December, but now I suspect that what I thought was the drug working, was actually just me feeling good because the side-effects were finally ending.

I feel like my life has become a soap opera, and I’m not even one of the important cast. I’m just a reccuring character, who’s name they show 5 minutes into the episode, after the first batch of commercials, after the guest stars.

There’s lots of soap-opera-ish stuff going on all around me, but I’m not directly involved in any of it. Nonetheless, every aspect of my life is affected by the antics of the major players.

My part is also one of the ones that the directors feel is safe to cut, especially if some major drama is required – it’s the sort of role where you’re familiar enough to the regulars that there’ll be a sufficient amount of emotional return if the character gets axed, without having to risk one of the stars.

So that’s where I am right now. Not popular or important enough to spin-off and get a life of my own, stuck in a recurring bit part in other people’s soap-opera drama.