Unintended consequences (the law of)

I usually look forward to daylight savings. It usually signals the start of spring, warmer weather, etc. This year, of course, daylight savings came early on March 11 instead of the first week of April and since then, I've had a mini private IT disaster going on. I heard stories on the radio about Y2K-type preparations and thought "ya right". Was I wrong!

At first, I thought the worse part of this new daylight savings was that I had to change the clock on my laptop manually. That turned out to be the least of my headaches. For the last 5 days, the time on my Outlook calendar invites are reaching other people all messed-up though they look fine on my calendar. The people that I am sending the invites too are using Google Calendar (probably time for me to chuck Outlook as well). A couple of times, the clock on my laptop has revered back mysteriously and I had to reset it. Apparently, there is patch to Windows XP. However, for the last year, Windows Update has been causing me headaches with some Office update s that it has tried repeatedly to download and update. Finally, I turned Windows Update off and I don't even want to think about turning it back on to fix this daylight savings issue.

My fancy Windows Mobile Samsung Blackjack smartphone clock has been off as well. Yesterday, March 14 (3 days after daylight savings too effect) I got an SMS from Cingular about a patch that I need to download to fix the problem on my PDA. Whatever happened to notifying people AHEAD of the problem? Whatever happened to pushing such important updates onto these "smart" devices?

As of this post, both of these issues remain unresolved -- I've got much bigger fish to fry for now...