Ramblin' On: Daylight Savings; Surfing on a Cellphone

Hi all,

Welcome to the first edition of my semi-regular (read: Whenever I actually have time) Techno-Oddities column, "Ramblin' On." As you can surmise by the title, I'm going to be doing just that -- yapping about anything that catches my attention, makes me chuckle, or pisses me off (more than likely the latter).

Getting right into it, let's talk about the whole Daylight savings time thing the folks in DC are proposing. If you've been living under a beach umbrella, you might have missed that our fine politicians have proposed an extension to Daylight savings time, extending it a month. Their logic -- more daylight increases productivity, cuts down on traffic accidents, and conserves energy.

Cut down on accidents huh? Tell that to the three I passed (at five miles an hour) this morning on the Long Island Expressway. Maybe all this daylight got in their eyes?

And I'm sorry -- conserve energy? Not on our side of the workforce fence. In fact, there's a chance that we'll have some tweaks and mods to make on computer clocks and other various programs that rely on time-based software. So computers will be running longer while fixes are made, and our IT guys will be staying later at work while making those fixes, and surprise...end up driving home in the dark anyway.

But hey, why worry? As Reps. Edward Markey of Massachusetts says, the change "...will make everyone sunnier."

Gosh Golly, Ed's right! I'll be so much happier with the sun smiling down on me as I skip down sugardrop lane on my way home to my Gingerbread house in snugglefrump valley.

(Sigh.)

No doubt the folks at AOL will be happy for more sun in their workdays -- it'll give them time to test their new Mobile Search Services. The service will let wireless phone users search the Internet and link to regular Web pages that it will reformat for tiny cell-phone screens.

Okay, has ANYONE really surfed the web using a cell phone? I mean come on -- really. I bought a cell phone a while back that had browsing capabilities. I used it once. I ended up with a new cell phone a few months a later. The most I've done with my current cell phone is downloaded a cute little version of "Burger Time" to play while my wife is in the store. And even that gives me a headache when I try to stare at the little frankfurter and eggs chasing my lil' blob of a chef guy as he tries to stack the hamburgers. Why the migraine? Because the screen is WEE! It's just a teeny thing. Who the heck wants to check out websites on these little screens? I don't even bother text messaging anyone -- Then again, I'm not fourteen and sitting in a boring ol' Biology class.

Surfing the web belongs on a computer, not on a cell phone...unless you're a smurf.

Alright. Enough rambling for one week.

T