You would think everyday of the year has twenty-four hours right? That’s what I thought while writing a typical function to calculate the time difference between two dates. As I found out, especially in this time of year, this is a horribly flawed assumption. In a lot of timezones, one day of the year has 23 hours while another day has 25 hours. Some of you might have gathered by now that I’m talking about Daylight Saving Time. The marvellous invention, epitome of temporal manipulation that makes it so that this Sunday, there would be only be one hour between 1AM and 3AM. In summary, 3-1 = 1. Those of you on northern hemisphere will find that you will experience 2AM twice.

Once upon a time, I used to a backup cron job that runs on 2AM. 2AM seems to be a nice time as everyone is asleep so that the server could use the spare processing power for the menial task. In one day of the year it ran twice. In one day of the year it never ran. Now all my backups run at 4AM.

As a programmer, I hate DST.