Time shifts

My laptop is back!  It got done early, I'm really pleased.  The space bar doesn't squeak and the keyboard feels totally different and much nicer.

BBC News: Venezuela and the politics of time.

The move to put the clocks back half an hour adds Venezuela to a small club of nations out of sync with global standardised time.  These states - which include India, Iran, Afghanistan, Burma, Sri Lanka and parts of Australia and Canada - operate in what are known as fractional time zones.  A string of 10 Pacific islands east of New Zealand, the Chatham Islands, are even more exceptional - being an eccentric 45 minutes out of sync.  So are Nepal and a strip of Western Australia which, although home to just 200 people, has its own, unofficial time zone - Central Western Time - some eight-and-three-quarter hours ahead of GMT.

China only has one time zone, Beijing time, despite sitting across five time zones.  The extra weeks of Daylight Savings Time in the US this year was really nice.  But moving a half hour back seems odd.

(I do not like the new BBC website advertisments.  Thankfully Firefox can block them, but it is just wrong to see them there.  I grew up with the BBC as the only ad-free radio and TV and I hate to see it sullied with adverts.)