5 ms·

TIL the Navajo nation (in North East Arizona) recognizes daylight savings while the enclaved Hopi nation does not along with the rest of Arizona.

rconti 7y ago
Oh man. I went on a Southwest roadtrip with my wife. We had an appointment to tour Canyon de Chelly with a Navajo guide on Sunday AM. We checked into a motel just barely on the reservation on Saturday night before the DST change. When we entered Arizona, it was, I think, on different time from California. But that night, California was going to move onto the same time as Arizona. The Navajo reservation, too, would be changing times, to match Central, I think. My new-to-me car, with a "DST" box checked on the Nav system, and with the theoretical capability to change timezones based on location and DST rules, would do god-knows-what. We of course had to assume our appointment would be on Navajo time, but had no way of knowing whether our cell phones would switch or not, because there was no way of knowing whether there was GPS-based timezone logic, how precise it was, whether timekeeping was only based on the tower you're connected to, and whether the towers in question were on the reservation or outside of it. Needless to say, we actually set the bedside alarm clock and used it. (of course, these things often go awry as you find out you set it on radio instead of buzzer, and the radio is not tuned to a legitimate station, or the volume is too low, or whatever). Oh and I later found out the checkbox on my car just literally meant "are you on DST or not". Yeah, even though it has the capability to pull time from the satellites and cell towers, and even though it knows where I am, and in fact WOULD set the clock from GPS, you had to manually set the timezone and current setting of DST as you moved on and off DST.
- wtmt 7y ago
  Was the bedside clock set correctly or was intelligent enough for you to make it on time for the tour? It’s not clear to me from your story what happened with the tour.
  - rconti 7y ago
    We made it :) It was an old school alarm clock, so you could expect it to at least be consistent, which is all that mattered. I don't remember if we set it ahead, or left it where it was, but we knew where it would be tour time. Whereas we could not trust our phones to not do something funky. Or to do something funky and undesired.
    - ta999999171 7y ago
      Phone timer isn't allergic to DST, for the future.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- mstade 7y ago
  You forgot to say if you made the tour on time! What a cliff hanger! Thankfully I saw the answer in another comment, glad you made it. :o) I went on a road trip last summer, and as a foreigner was thoroughly confused when driving across Alabama to Georgia, and the time changed. Then I got even more confused as I was driving in Tennessee and Kentucky, and the time just kept changing. I think I understand time zones in theory, but in practice I always mess up and get it wrong, and confusion and hilarity often ensues. :o)
wtmt 7y ago
Indiana had some differences like this before April 2006, with most counties following DST and some not following it. Now it’s just most counties using Eastern Time and some using Central Time, with all of them following DST changes.
tal8d 7y ago
You just triggered a deeply repressed memory. I had to write some software that integrated a properly designed logistics database with an improperly designed USPS mail piece tracking feed. What constitutes a proper design? UTC timestamps. USPS, at the time, provided a service that allowed mailers to track their individually serialized mail pieces with an impressive level of granularity. Every sort machine reported its model number and the nature of the event, which is very useful when trying to track the cause of damage - as some models were more aggressive than others (speed, bend radius, etc). Unfortunately they only reported times in the local representation... "No problem" a much younger and happier me said, "they have helpfully included the zipcode that the scan occurred in!" That was an absolute nightmare. Nonsensical timezone pockets, not necessarily along postal lines, arbitrarily changing at what point they switch to daylight saving time... and yes, areas around reservations were the most common offenders. Oh and you can't just cleanly ingest the data - converting it to UTC on import, because you only find out that they switched after you start seeing time travelling mail pieces in your staging datastore. I don't think I'd ever been more tortured by a problem, only a couple of years before that I had been fighting house to house in Fallujah - and that USPS system integration had me wonder if I'd made a mistake in not renewing my contract.
- kortilla 7y ago
  Fucking Indiana was probably the source of 90% of your pain. Time zones and DST were a country free for all there until the mid 2000s IIRC. State couldn’t decide if it wanted to be central time or eastern so everyone got to decide on their own.
  - tal8d 7y ago
    Oh I blamed everyone, from USPS and the county level politicians - to the astrologists screwing around with the tz database... Also, and I hope this doesn't offend any surviving perl monks, having only perl at my disposal made it that much more unpleasant. I never touched perl after that project wound down, but I do wonder to what degree that experience influenced my subsequent shift to porting AIX software... Indiana was certainly involved. I'm sure I've got a copy of a backup of a copy that would contain those old scripts, but I'm no joke starting to get a little upset just thinking about how much time was needlessly wasted on such a stupid problem.

rconti 7y ago

Oh man. I went on a Southwest roadtrip with my wife. We had an appointment to tour Canyon de Chelly with a Navajo guide on Sunday AM. We checked into a motel just barely on the reservation on Saturday night before the DST change. When we entered Arizona, it was, I think, on different time from California. But that night, California was going to move onto the same time as Arizona. The Navajo reservation, too, would be changing times, to match Central, I think. My new-to-me car, with a "DST" box checked on the Nav system, and with the theoretical capability to change timezones based on location and DST rules, would do god-knows-what. We of course had to assume our appointment would be on Navajo time, but had no way of knowing whether our cell phones would switch or not, because there was no way of knowing whether there was GPS-based timezone logic, how precise it was, whether timekeeping was only based on the tower you're connected to, and whether the towers in question were on the reservation or outside of it. Needless to say, we actually set the bedside alarm clock and used it. (of course, these things often go awry as you find out you set it on radio instead of buzzer, and the radio is not tuned to a legitimate station, or the volume is too low, or whatever). Oh and I later found out the checkbox on my car just literally meant "are you on DST or not". Yeah, even though it has the capability to pull time from the satellites and cell towers, and even though it knows where I am, and in fact WOULD set the clock from GPS, you had to manually set the timezone and current setting of DST as you moved on and off DST.

wtmt 7y ago
Was the bedside clock set correctly or was intelligent enough for you to make it on time for the tour? It’s not clear to me from your story what happened with the tour.
- rconti 7y ago
  We made it :) It was an old school alarm clock, so you could expect it to at least be consistent, which is all that mattered. I don't remember if we set it ahead, or left it where it was, but we knew where it would be tour time. Whereas we could not trust our phones to not do something funky. Or to do something funky and undesired.
  - ta999999171 7y ago
    Phone timer isn't allergic to DST, for the future.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
mstade 7y ago
You forgot to say if you made the tour on time! What a cliff hanger! Thankfully I saw the answer in another comment, glad you made it. :o) I went on a road trip last summer, and as a foreigner was thoroughly confused when driving across Alabama to Georgia, and the time changed. Then I got even more confused as I was driving in Tennessee and Kentucky, and the time just kept changing. I think I understand time zones in theory, but in practice I always mess up and get it wrong, and confusion and hilarity often ensues. :o)

wtmt 7y ago

Indiana had some differences like this before April 2006, with most counties following DST and some not following it. Now it’s just most counties using Eastern Time and some using Central Time, with all of them following DST changes.

tal8d 7y ago

You just triggered a deeply repressed memory. I had to write some software that integrated a properly designed logistics database with an improperly designed USPS mail piece tracking feed. What constitutes a proper design? UTC timestamps. USPS, at the time, provided a service that allowed mailers to track their individually serialized mail pieces with an impressive level of granularity. Every sort machine reported its model number and the nature of the event, which is very useful when trying to track the cause of damage - as some models were more aggressive than others (speed, bend radius, etc). Unfortunately they only reported times in the local representation... "No problem" a much younger and happier me said, "they have helpfully included the zipcode that the scan occurred in!" That was an absolute nightmare. Nonsensical timezone pockets, not necessarily along postal lines, arbitrarily changing at what point they switch to daylight saving time... and yes, areas around reservations were the most common offenders. Oh and you can't just cleanly ingest the data - converting it to UTC on import, because you only find out that they switched after you start seeing time travelling mail pieces in your staging datastore. I don't think I'd ever been more tortured by a problem, only a couple of years before that I had been fighting house to house in Fallujah - and that USPS system integration had me wonder if I'd made a mistake in not renewing my contract.

kortilla 7y ago
Fucking Indiana was probably the source of 90% of your pain. Time zones and DST were a country free for all there until the mid 2000s IIRC. State couldn’t decide if it wanted to be central time or eastern so everyone got to decide on their own.
- tal8d 7y ago
  Oh I blamed everyone, from USPS and the county level politicians - to the astrologists screwing around with the tz database... Also, and I hope this doesn't offend any surviving perl monks, having only perl at my disposal made it that much more unpleasant. I never touched perl after that project wound down, but I do wonder to what degree that experience influenced my subsequent shift to porting AIX software... Indiana was certainly involved. I'm sure I've got a copy of a backup of a copy that would contain those old scripts, but I'm no joke starting to get a little upset just thinking about how much time was needlessly wasted on such a stupid problem.