Parts of Portugal are so far west that there’s a reasonable case for it not being on London time but another time zone over – the Azores one. OK, not all that strong a case, being two hours out from Spain would be odd etc.
However, using one of the major appointment reminder services (no names, no packdrill, but from a company that provides both search and email) you end up getting reminded of appointments on Azores time, not Portuguese. Some investigation (a bloke who used to drink in the same pub now works at HQ) and I find out that this time zone allocation is not in fact from that major company. It’s a step – at least – further back into the system. Some significant part of the world now has this error coded into it.
It’s not there yet but there could actually come a time when it would be sensible for Portugal to move to Azores time rather than trying to fix the coding.
Maybe.
This could be part of the errors with the distributed TimeZone service thingy that was mentioned on Reg a couple of weeks ago.
Boo hiss! I thought you’d start chatting about the Carthaginians discovering the Azores, or the Vikings, or the like. Instead it’s just about some routine IT boneheadedness.
I wonder how they deal with Australia? NSW and Victoria have just gone into daylight savings time, Queensland (in the same timezone otherwise) don’t do it. Fine for me all the way down in Melbourne, but near the NSW/QLD border must be a pain?
I no longer bother with The Wokister, but I assume you are referring to the argument currently ongoing in the timezone database project. IIRC the issue is with historical data, and whether “white” parts of the world have an unfair advantage; and closing that advantage by deleting parts of the data to make the historical data wrong and therefore just as bad as “brown” parts of the world.
I’ve just tried looking up the time in Portugal, and it seems to be giving me correct answers (it’s currently half-ish past one in the UK):
% TZ=Portugal date
Mon 11 Oct 2021 13:25:24 WEST
% TZ=Europe/Lisbon date
Mon 11 Oct 2021 13:25:32 WEST
It may be pure timezone folklore, but I remember hearing from one source that there were even a few years in which VIC and NSW both observed DST but with different transition dates. Supposedly Albury/Wodonga shifted their clocks with VIC in odd-numbered years and NSW in even-numbered years.
IIRC one of the US states (?Indiana) allowed counties to decide whether they wanted to adopt DST or not. There was an episode of the West Wing based on this odd situation. I think it’s since been regularized.
And much the same for Spain. There being no more of Spain east of Greenwich than the UK. Blame Francisco’s friendship with Uncle Dolfo.
“Blame Francisco’s friendship with Uncle Dolfo.” Why did France and the Low Countries not throw off the Nazi yoke after the war and return to their prewar time zones? Why stick with Berlin time?
Why doesn’t someone ask La Sturgeona which time zone her independent Scotland will use?
“Why did France and the Low Countries not throw off the Nazi yoke after the war and return to their prewar time zones? Why stick with Berlin time?”
Because the EU was already on the drawing board in ’45. The first attempt having failed earlier the same year.
Arizona except for the Navajo Nation does not do Daylight Savings Time. It is on Mountain Standard Time for the whole year. Didn’t have much of a problem going between there and the Pacific time zone.
@Dearieme Because the Low Countries may dislike the Germans in a rather laissez-faire way, but we’re quite aware of the fact that economically we’re tied to the western-german hip with rather solid chains.
Has been that way since Hanzebund era.
“Why doesn’t someone ask La Sturgeona which time zone her independent Scotland will use?”
Jockish Mean Time. About a century behind anyone else’s
“Because the EU was already on the drawing board in ’45. The first attempt having failed earlier the same year.”
1939-45 was the second German attempt:
“We must create a central European economic association through common customs treaties, all its members will be formally equal…but, in practice, will be under German leadership and must stabilize Germany’s economic dominance…”.
German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg in 1914 setting out his goals for World War I.
“A united states of Europe against America…”
Kaiser Wilhelm II calling for a European economic union.
All before the Nazis spoke of a “European economic community,” which would experience “rapidly increasing prosperity once national economic barriers are removed” – with a “European currency system” that would operate with fixed exchange rates among certain currencies until a single currency could be gradually introduced.
But G, in ’45 it would have been easy for the Allied governments of the British, French and US zones of occupation to put them all on pre-war Amsterdam time. Berlin was just a distant island in a sea of Soviet occupation. Face could have been saved by calling it, say, Rhine Time.
Seems a missed opportunity to me. It would have been up to France and Italy whether they joined Amsterdam time or not.
My limited experience of Portugal give me the impression that it works largely on African time.
When the eastern Oz states introduced DST, Queensland was under National Party rule owing to the malfunction of the Labor Party’s gerrymander – you can imagine the media’s outrage at this vile right wing plot.
Since the Nats were a rural party, they didn’t want the time zones to alter, supposedly because the cows were used to being milked at a set time.
There was much hilarity at these half-witted hicks refusing to accept ‘the science’. I naturally felt that the witless foreigners should all obey us instead.
@Dearieme. They might have called it “Rhine Time”, but it still would/should have been UTC( or Greenwich Main at the time) +1. Because of the sun thingie and earth’s curvature.
https://www.ct.nl/app/uploads/2019/03/Tijdzones-1024×315.jpg
Shows how the things “should” run according to actual solar time zones between winter time, summer time, and “real””time.
Note that there’s not a chance in hell the french would ever adapt the same time as the brits.. Even though it makes sense logically.
Sort of the same as the spanish, I guess.
Something historical, I believe.. 😉
And for the Lowlands it’s a marginal difference solar time wise, but it gives a whole 1 hour extra light at night. 2 since the adaptation of the abomination that is summer time.
At the time, having 1-2 hours of extra daylight where it was actually useful made a large difference.
I do know that when CET is referred to by cities, Berlin isn’t in the standard list for us cloggies at least.. It’s “Amsterdam, Vienna, Paris, Prague/Stockholm”… Madrid may pop up at the end, Brussels may be thrown in as an afterthought, but Berlin rarely crops up. If it’s german, it’d be Hamburg or Köln, not Berlin.
OK, so the [img] html tag doesn’t work in the comments… Curses!! Evil!!
Suffer the URL-clicking, Peons!! 😉
Alan Peakall, yes, for quite a while NSW/VIC had different dates a few weeks apart for DST. That was fun. I think that was fixed around 2000.
Boganboy, you forgot to mention that DST would fade the curtains more 🙂
I was configuring a Dell ethernet switch once and when I tried to put in the DST dates it popped up an error message “DST start date cannot be after end date”. Sigh.
Why would you put DST on a switch? The date/time is only there for logging purposes and that works much better with a timebase that doesn’t jump around.
Tractor Gent – depends on the situation. If it’s a localized site you might want everything on the same time, otherwise when inspecting logs you have keep looking at the date to decide whether to add an hour when comparing events on desktops, etc.
Is there any reason we can’t all use the same damn clock and just do things at different “times”? So in Clogland and Krautland start the day at 7 rather than the 8 used in Shortageland or Pasteisland? At 6 in Jewishland, 3:30 in Hindustan, and in 1832 in rural New South Wales?
BiNK(Gp)
Nah. Can’t do that. It would confuse the wokesters, who would decide that a later time for an event in dusky places was an expression of racist patriarchy…
IIRC, when France first did standard time, they did Paris Time. They then switched to “nine minutes and eleven seconds behind Paris Mean Time” (ie GMT, but they didn’t call it that) – and then to GMT+1 during the German occupation, but they retained that on liberation because Britain was also on GMT+1 during the war (and “double summer time” in the summer). When Britain reverted to GMT after the war, in October 1945, the French chose not to and went to GMT+1 all year around, only starting summer time at some point in the 1970s.