Changing the clock

 Today's Clock Change day, the day when the south east of Australia finally acknowledges the imminent onset of winter and puts the clock back an hour.

The cats, of course, were merely puzzled as to why the humans were still in bed and bounded in to demand breakfast and to be let out because, hey, the sun was up, even though officially it was not quite six thirty in the morning.

There will doubtless be more feline grumpiness later today when they find dinner's going to be later than usual, but they'll adjust.

In the old days, when I still had family overseas, clock change day was important as suddenly we went from being eleven hours ahead of the UK to nine hours - at one time for some weird reason Canberra used to go forward when Europe went back and vice versa, which was a bit silly - by the last weekend in October we were well into spring, and the last weekend in March was a little too early.

Nowadays we change on first weekend in October and the first weekend in April.

The one advantage of following Europe was we didn't have a few weeks in October and a week around Easter when the time difference was ten hours - scheduling calls is definitely easier when the difference is only nine hours rather than eleven.

In the old days, and I'm talking thirty or forty years ago, when there was no internet wide time synchronisation and time servers needed to be reset and reconfigured by hand clock change day was always a bit stressful as inevitably there would be one server in an inaccessible cupboard somewhere that hadn't picked up the update.

However that's all in the past - we're down to the oven, the microwave and the big pretend railway station clock in the loungeroom needing to be changed manually - since we replaced all the other clocks with either Lenovo smart clocks or Google smart displays everything else just does it automagically ...