Hey, it’s mid-March, so that means it’s time to move the clocks forward in a futile attempt to save energy. Or so they say. As I’ve mentioned in previous years’ versions of this post, daylight save time hasn’t been shown to actually save energy.

What it has been shown to result in is an increase in accidents because people are discombobulated by the change in their sleep pattern, much like being jet lagged, and a 10% increase the likelihood that you’ll experience a heart attack during the days immediately following the time change. And you’ll probably feel a bit jet lagged, too. I’m really not convinced it’s worth it.

If you’re a *NIX system administrator you probably updated your systems a couple of years ago, but in case you haven’t you probably should take a look at this. The zdump command should give you something like this:

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[gordon@seedling gordon]$ zdump -v /etc/localtime|grep 2016
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 06:59:59 2016 UTC = Sun Mar 13 01:59:59 2016 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 07:00:00 2016 UTC = Sun Mar 13 03:00:00 2016 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 05:59:59 2016 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:59:59 2016 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 06:00:00 2016 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:00:00 2016 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

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