ubl — archive

[Jon Bosak]

Hello UBL TC, Due to a recent ill-considered change in U.S. law, daylight time in the U.S. will begin this year next Sunday, 11 March, rather than in April as formerly. This will, of course, destroy various international time-change alignments that have been painfully put in place over the last 20 years and make the job of scheduling international conference calls much more difficult for the next month or so. In keeping with established practice in the UBL TC, our meeting times will change as follows beginning next week: - The Pacific call will stay at 00:30-02:30 UTC/GMT every Tuesday, but due to the change to daylight time, the clock time for callers in the U.S. will appear to shift forward one hour (to start at 17:30 Monday in San Francisco and 20:30 Monday in New York). The starting local time will remain at 08:30 Tuesday in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Beijing and at 09:30 Tuesday in Seoul, Tokyo, and Perth. - The Atlantic call, on the other hand, will move back one hour to run from 15:00-17:00 UTC/GMT instead of 16:00-18:00 UTC/GMT so that the local (now daylight) times in North America appear to stay the same as they were during the winter (08:00-10:00 in San Francisco, 11:00-13:00 in New York). Unlike previous years, however, this year times in Europe WILL NOT appear to stay the same until European locations make their own change to daylight time later in the season; beginning Sunday, European call-in times will shift backward along with the UTC/GMT change -- for a few weeks, anyway. Given the almost hopeless task of accurately maintaining the detailed list of local times that I've been including in meeting agendas, I think the best strategy is to give up on that and simply rely on everyone, beginning next week, to check the Time and Date site to find the local time for each call at their location: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/ Then the rule becomes very simple: starting next week, and until next November, the Pacific call starts at 00:30 UTC/GMT, and the Atlantic call starts at 15:00 UTC/GMT. Check the site above every week to find out what the clocks will say in your locale. Jon