A blog
Seattle got cold today. I don’t know why the temperature always seems to drop about 10 degrees the same weekend we turn back the clocks. Perhaps the temperature will drop one week later next year? :)
Slate’s Tim Harford speculates that the US would be better off with one national time zone.
Kenny read recently that the starting and ending dates for Daylight Savings Time would be changing, in order to conserve energy. He told me that the new “Fall Back” date was November 4, rather than the weekend before Halloween, as it nornally falls.
This morning, we got a phone call from our friend Nichol, reminding us that we needed to adjust our clocks. She had been alerted because she turned on her computer to check her email, and she noticed that her computer’s system time had been adjusted for the end of Daylight Savings. But Kenny informed her that the dates had in fact changed this year, and that we still had one more week to change the clocks. Then he had an alarming thought: Had Microsoft dropped the ball on providing an update for this change? Kenny shook his head, and said, “someone is surely going to get fired for this.”
Later on in the day, we noticed that the time had automatically adjusted on our cell phones as well. Had Verizon also failed to get the memo? I tried calling “Time,” but it seems that their phone number is no longer POP-CORN and I did not have a computer nearby. Maybe Kenny was crazy? (well, we knew he was crazy, but we were not yet certain that this situation was further evidence of that fact).
It turns out that the article about the Daylight Savings change also contained some important dates:
The dates change next year, not this year. And next year, Daylight Savings also begins almost a month earlier.
The changes are being instituted in order to save energy, and in the past Daylight time has begun as early as January 6 (in 1974, during an energy crisis). Which makes me wonder — don’t we have energy troubles now? Has the government missed the memo about global warming? (well, dumb question, I guess — we all know that the current administration has) Are there reasons that we can’t just have Daylight Savings Time all the time?
I’m sure I’m missing some obvious answer to why we can’t just always have Daylight Savings Time; perhaps I’ll read more about it tomorrow. I, for one, would love it if it didn’t get dark at 3:30pm in the middle of winter in Seattle.
Seema has a good post explaining why software rendering is sometimes faster than hardware rendering for layered windows. In short, your software vs. hardware performance will depend on your specific video card. Seema suggests:
Key takeaway: a semi-transparent window is a particularly complex feature for WPF’s rendering system. Figure out early what type of hardware that you expect your app to run on, the performance that is acceptable for your users, and whether you want to use Window transparency.
My friend and co-worker Hamid just pointed me to Clearification.com, a very interesting new joint project from the Windows Vista team and Demetri Martin. It hosts a series of episodes that tell the story of Demetri’s “condition,” and presumably how he overcomes it. Only the first episode is available now, but the others are all “coming soon.” The site publishes a feed so that you can keep up to date on new additions, and of course, so that you can watch those new episodes as soon as they are posted. It seems pretty cool so far, I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
I liked this AP headline today: Microsoft’s Vista May Arrive on Time. If the AP is starting to have confidence, we must be ready. ;)