What a Difference an Hour Makes

By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Monday, August 8, 2005 10:33 AM

Just as I started thinking that the term "Y2K" might have reached the point where it's the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question, I was proven wrong.

I have Congress to thank for this. The Senate and House of Representatives last week approved an energy bill that President Bush is expected to sign today. In it you can find language that would extend Daylight Savings Time by four weeks, starting it three weeks earlier and ending it a week later.

The move, according to the Associated Press, is designed to help save energy, but consumer electronics experts are saying things that should sound vaguely familiar to anyone who remembers late 1999.

"When daylight-saving time starts earlier than usual in the United States come 2007, your VCR or DVD recorder could start recording shows an hour late," reported Anick Jesdanun at the AP . "Cell phone companies could give you an extra hour of free weekend calls, and people who depend on online calendars may find themselves late for appointments."

These kinds of glitches were the least of the problems that technologists said we could expect around New Year's Day 2000. The problem is that many computer systems and electronics devices were designed with internal clocks that marked the passing years with two digits instead of four. That meant that at midnight on Jan. 1, PC clocks would flip from the year "99" to "00," which most software at the time was designed to interpret as 1900. Many feared this would crash all sorts of date-dependent systems, from accounting spreadsheets to nuclear-reactor mainframes.

We awaited all kinds of calamities because of the date shift. Businesses and governments spent about $200 billion to upgrade systems in a frantic effort to avoid disaster, according to the AP.

The White House appointed a special adviser. My colleague Dave and I got to work out of an official Y2K nerve center in D.C., ready to report on pandemonium. The Senate even established a special committee on the problem, giving us reporters plenty of article fodder to please our editors on otherwise dry news days. Dave even parlayed his "Year 2000 bug expertise" into his first television appearance -- C-SPAN in the middle of the night, the time when, as everybody knows, survivalists tune in to public access programming for signs of the apocalypse.

Y2K was good to us.

The "extra hour" is expected to be a convenience blip at most. Jesdanun wrote, "The daylight-saving transition will be at most a mini-Y2K, with the impact of any failure far less reaching."

In other words, there's no need for the hunker-in-the-bunker mentality except, perhaps, for those of us who think it's time to head for remotest Wyoming if we can't TiVo the finale of "Survivor: Lost in the Quad Cities" or "They Saved Hitler's Brain."

Still, technology is only useful to us when it works, and Jesdanun quoted several sources who suggested that the less tech-savvy (i.e., most of us) might suffer some jet lag: "'It wouldn't be a society-wide catastrophe, but there would be a problem if nothing's done about it or we try to move too quickly,' said Dave Thewlis, executive director of a group that promotes standards for calendar software."

"Some electric utilities have advanced meters to adjust rates based on peak and non-peak hours, and studies would be required to determine if any modifications are needed. The telecommunications industry, meanwhile, must ensure that its clocks are properly adjusted to bill customers properly. Adding to the complications is the fact that many computer programs now treat U.S. and Canadian time zones as the same. If Canada doesn't adopt the new dates, too, Windows, calendars and other software would have to learn additional zones."

Other experts tried to balance out the situation, including Joe Tasker at the Information Technology Association of America, who told the AP "that daylight time already varies around the world, and some parts of the United States don't observe it at all. 'We already are used to having a system in place that specifies all the information that we need' for a particular region, Tasker said. 'It's just a question of changing the effective date.'"

I hope that Tasker got it all wrong. I don't care if the VCR, DVD and TiVo don't work. These problems will iron themselves out. I want a Y2007K disaster so I can get that extra hour of weekend airtime on my cell phone.

I'll personally thank President Bush if he can make that impossible dream come true.

13 Million Koreans Can't Be Wrong

Wired.com has a story today about Cyworld, a social networking company run by South Korea's SK Communications. Now, I am aware that there are a ton of social networks out there, and for all their popularity, they aren't setting financial analysts on fire -- figuratively speaking.

Cyworld, however, seems to be hotter than a fresh bowl of yuk gae jang: "According to the service, Cyworld jumped from 10 million to 13 million users in 2004. A quarter of the country's 48.2 million people have signed up, including 90 percent of the 24- to 29-year-old age group, the company claims."

A quarter of the population? Sounds like press release boilerplate material, but I'm not ready to dismiss it out of hand. Here's more:

"Users get their own page, a virtual living room called a minihompy where they can create diaries, publish images, network, host legal background music and more. Members personalize their minihompy with virtual objects they purchase from Cyworld, and enhance it with up to 10 tracks of background music they can buy and play for visitors. Universal Music International sells 100,000 tracks a day though Cyworld, according to Adam White, Universal's vice president of communications," Wired reported. ("Hompy", by the way, is the Korean-language equivalent of "home page.")

The article continues: "Like Friendster, Cyworld lets users create networks based on degrees of closeness. But Cyworld is Friendster-plus. As well as websites and blogs, Cyworld has its own version of the popular game The Sims. It also gives users unlimited image hosting, the ability to update pages by mobile phone and special-interest bulletin boards. The service has its own currency called dotoris (acorns) and its own slang and social obligations."

Apparently etiquette is even more important here than on other sites, according to Cyworld user Charlie Shin, who said that "Korean social customs contribute to Cyworld's success. 'Everyone [who visits your page] starts leaving you messages,' said Shin. 'If you don't write back or leave a [guestbook] message on their site, they get upset.' In Korea, not responding in a timely fashion is seen as rude and upsetting. The end result is a 'vicious and unending cycle of messages,' Shin said. 'You can literally spend all day on the site writing everyone a message.'"

Introduce this to the North and I guarantee you they'll have no time to keep playing with plutonium.

Apologies for not being able to find an English-language version. Cyworld's international editions include Chinese and Japanese, but the only English I could find was on the Chinese site where an anime boy orders me to "JUST BE HAPPY!"

What's in a Domain Name?

Ever since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq started in 2003, I've wondered -- like any good tech columnist -- how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) would handle Iraq's country domain.

For those of you who understandably don't understand what I'm talking about, this is ".iq," as in "www.findiraqisingles.iq." Each country has its own code, from the United States (.us) to Germany (.de) to Brazil (.br), with which it can do whatever it wants -- but Iraq's code was made useless by the international sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime and turned over by ICANN to Texas-based Infocom Corp.

The AP now reports that since Infocom was shut down after its chief executive and his brothers were indicted on federal charges of sending money to Islamic extremist group Hamas, the non-profit ICANN -- which runs the Internet's address system -- decided in a private conference call of its board members last month to transfer control of .iq to Iraq's telecommunications regulator.

You might think this is no big deal, but some island nations such as Tuvalu (with ".tv") have made some scratch this way. Also, it's important to national identity, as the AP noted: "Palestinians got '.ps' in 1999, allowing them to avoid using the more cumbersome 'ps.int' or sharing Israel's '.il.'"

Serving Your Parking Ticket Needs

Boston is using modern technology to make absolutely sure that you get nailed for your parking violations. The Globe reported that the city's 162 parking enforcement officers will have handheld computers to print out waterproof tickets by the end of the month.

"Over the decades, countless motorists have been dismayed to find the handwritten citations, and then have had to decipher the scrawl and the checked-off boxes to figure out what they had done wrong. For some, the old-fashioned tickets have been their saviors -- illegible writing or data-entry errors helped them beat the citations. For others, summoned for not paying tickets that weren't really theirs, goofs have caused much grief," the paper reported. "Boston's Transportation Department says the new ticket machines will fix those troubles. 'It really minimizes the potential for mistakes,' said Tom Tinlin, acting transportation commissioner. 'This takes out the human error factor. Any time you are writing something down, it's only as good as the penmanship or the pen in your hand.'"

As someone who has experienced firsthand the pain of finding a parking spot in Boston as well as the insult of Beantown's tickets, I humbly suggest to that city's residents that there never was a better time for a tea party ...

Send links and comments to robertDOTmacmillanATwashingtonpost.com.