Seeing that Dean was kind enough to feature me in his tech cache over at b4G, I figured it was time to actually post something technology-related.

I discovered yesterday that Movable Type thought the time in Hawai’i was an hour later than it actually was. I hadn’t noticed before because I tend to write in spurts, saving drafts and publishing stuff whenever it’s convenient (and updating the time of publication manually).

Technology has rapidly been improving in its understanding of the horrible wrinkle in timekeeping known as daylight savings time (which Hawai’i was smart enough to ignore when it was introduced). Even my watch lets me set daylight savings time on my world clock mode with only two button presses. Even so, technology seems to get confused – just like me – from time to time. (No pun intended.)

I tried Internet searches without any luck. Finally, I bit the dust and sat down to do some tedious blog manipulation and kludging (I hate kludges):

• I manually changed the RSS 0.91 and 1.0 templates to hard-code my time zone as GMT-10.
• With the conveniently pre-installed copy of phpMyAdmin, I manually changed every time in the MT database to reflect the correct time. Good thing I’ve only been doing this a week.
• On the Weblog Configuration page, I set my current time zone to Nome Time, effectively lying to my blogging tool of choice.

So, two hours later, Waileia is now chronologically accurate, if not confused. (I think.) Now all I have to do is remember to set the time zone forward to -1000 when Standard Time resumes (when? October?).

I don’t know what technology to blame for this irritating error. My web hosting provider seems to get both its local time (MDT) and GMT right, and it’s unlikely the problem is Movable Type’s fault for the simple reason that my provider’s user forums are off by an hour too.

If it weren’t for its blatant commercialization, I might be more agreeable toward switching the world to Internet Time.