Another clockfuckery day has come and gone. Like Donald Trump, daylight saving time started as a joke, but our political system somehow ended up taking it seriously. While DST is obviously stupid, regular time zones are pretty annoying too. I’m not the first person to have considered switching to UTC and being done with them. This year the Washington Post discussed the idea as proposed by an economist and astronomer.
Back in 2005 I wrote about syslog brokenness — specifically, the fact that each entry is logged in local time zone, but with no indication of what that time zone was at the moment the message was logged. Because time zones change, this means there are periods of time every year where log messages are ambiguous. If your logging device moves across time zones, the problem is even worse, and sure enough, the problem has finally affected a real life case: we don’t know what happened just before the Amtrak 188 train derailed, because the timestamps on assorted logs were ambiguous.