DST and the Commonwealth Games 2006

Ahh – what a way to start a Sunday! As most of my home/office is controlled by Internet time, and the standard rule for determining the end of DST in Australia is that the clocks go back 1 hour on the last Sunday of March, today caused a little confusion for me. On waking I found that all of my PC connected appliances told the time as 1 hour less than my non-PC linked appliances. A quick check found that indeed today should have been the day that DST ended and clocks should have wound back 1 hour at 3am in the morning. Alas, due to the Commonwealth Games taking place in Melbourne, the Australian government had decided that the end of DST for 2006 should fall 1 week later on 2nd April 2006. While this arbitrary decision may have been well advertised in Australia (though I had no personal knowledge of it), it has not been accommodated by any of the world time services. So the upshot is that my PC will be 1 hour ahead of time for 1 whole week. I would have thought that in an age where a lot of things are controlled by internet timing mechanisms, it would have been easier to reschedule the Commonwealth Games to start 1 week earlier, or at the very least have all of the major SNTP servers alerted to the arbitary change in the end of DST. The only good thing – I had a whole extra hour of coding today, as my alarm woke me 1 hour earlier than expected!