A Strange DST Glitch ???

By Bruce Keener, Submitted Thursday, March 15, 2007

Topics:

Information Managers

I have a recurring appointment to give heartworm pills to my dogs, set for every 4 weeks on Saturday at 3:30pm. But, despite the fact that my Outlook Calendar is showing the time correctly, and that my Pocket PC shows the time correctly for Future appointments (NOT for this upcoming Saturday), it is showing for this Saturday as being at 4:30pm instead of 3:30pm. This is what shows on my Today screen, and what shows when I view it in the actual calendar.

Interesting thing is that when I select this Saturday's appointment to edit it, it shows up as being set for 3:30pm. What in the world is going on here? Note that it only seems to impact the nearest Recurring appointment, and has no impact on non-repeating events.

I have never had this happen before and it occurs to me that it is an oddity that is due to the DST (daylight savings time) patch from Microsoft. Yes, I did install their most recent patch on March 10 just to ensure that I had their latest DST patch.

Really odd. I also have a Palm TX that I have been playing with the past few weeks and it shows the appointment correctly for this Saturday (3:30pm). Of course I also applied Palm's DST patch.

Anyone else having any oddities after applying the DST patch?

Submitted by Bruce Keener on March 15, 2007 - 11:07am.

Thanks, Tom, it did solve the problem. It's interesting, though, that the explanation on the site explains the opposite of what I had, though:

"In existing recurring appointments, Outlook has encoded the current DST rules: Instances of recurring appointments that occur during the delta period will appear one hour earlier than they should."

This turns out to be the opposite of the problem that I have: my appointment is upshifted by an hour instead of downshifted.

Strange. Regardless the fix worked for the particular problem I had and hopefully didn't create any additional ones.

Submitted by Bruce Keener on March 17, 2007 - 9:41am.

Thanks for the comment, John.
I neglected to mention earlier that it changed one of my entries that it shouldn't have changed: it was not even a recurring entry, but one for this Sunday. Moved it to one hour earlier than the true time.

Submitted by Bruce Keener on March 20, 2007 - 12:19pm.

Good point. Certainly the case from my experience.

Submitted by Bruce Keener on March 20, 2007 - 5:37pm.

Good Grief !

Well, clearly my DST glitch is not isolated. It is beginning to seem that lack of glitches would be the isolated cases.