Time Travel

The morning has started quite early, just as I feared it would. Can I get myself into the rhythm of the Standard Time in less than a week? I hope so. When I was traveling it was quite easy for me and it took only a day to accommodate 3 hour time zone differences. But lately, (the past two years) it has been difficult. Aging?

Last night, at the Bunco game, (Yes, I was playing Bunco…though I’m not even sure how to spell it? Bunko?) I heard that Daylight Savings Time will be extended next year? How odd that I, a news junkie, didn’t know that? Is it true? Sure enough, here it is, “New Federal Law—Springing Forward in March, Back in November, months after Indiana passed the law that got it in step with the rest of the country, the federal government announced a major change in Daylight Saving Time. In Aug. 2005, Congress passed an energy bill that included extending Daylight Saving Time by about a month. Beginning in 2007, DST will start the second Sunday of March and end on the first Sunday of November.”

Once again I had a problem posting to my blogs this morning, same as yesterday, so I did a quick search of the topics on the Blogger user’s forum and found out that I wasn’t alone. And I found a fix; sort of… when you get the error message after trying to post, click on Re-Publish Index and it seems to take care of it, though I noted that not all of the users in the forum were successful in using this cure. Bloggers may have to wait till Monday morning for a complete cure.

And what’s new…besides the time change?

I have to access my new Google News Reader to see the news of the day. My “old” news aggregator, Pluck, has decided to get out of the news business in January, so I’m starting early in my search for a replacement. Google is OK so far, a little clumsy but it fits in with my Google Desktop/Home page and all of the Google add-ins.

Here’s a headline for the season…“TORONTO (CP) - There isn't enough proof that flu vaccine is effective to support public programs advocating widespread use of flu shots, a controversial vaccine epidemiologist is suggesting.” This is going to be a tough one to prove as the program has been in effect for so long and the pharmaceutical companies love it. Of course I can’t prove it either; I just know that I have always had a vague suspicion that the flu vaccination program wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

And there’s still news about the Great Spinach Disaster of 2006… I’m sure that the local farmers markets are reaping the benefits of the publics fear of packaged produce but I would have to say that it is now safer to eat packaged produce rather than local. Your local farmer could just as easily have contaminated produce…even easier if you realize that the local farmer has no one looking over his shoulder and monitoring how he picks and packs. The large commercial producers are now under more scrutiny than ever before, including their own incentive to not go out of business!