It is Just a Matter of Time

 

There was a time change during the night. We're now on Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT), the same as Sydney (+11 GMT), so while I was sleeping, I lost an hour some place and I was behind for the whole day. Not my fault!

The continental, contiguous US has 4 time zones, all varying by -1 hour as you move farther west through the zones. Granted there might be some confusion where a time zone cuts through a state and half the state is in one time zone and half in another, but in general, it seems to work. One state does not observe DST, but who cares about Arizona anyway?

The Aussies really are a bit wacked about their time zones. Continental Australia is about the same size as the continental USA. Australia has six states and two territories and six different time zones at the moment. While New South Wales, Victoria and ACT switched over to Daylight Time (DT) when we did in Tasmania at 0300 today, Queensland up north does not observe DT, so they're still on AEST. South Australia did change their clocks to daylight savings, but they're on Australia Central Time, so they moved their clocks an hour forward making the ACDT time zone 1-1/2 hours behind AEST. What's with the HALF hour? The Northern Territory, just north of South Australia (that definitely makes sense), does not observe DT, so they're just A CST... 1 /2 hour different than AEST. Okay, now there's Western Australia which is the big state in the west. It's on AWST (Australian Western Standard Time) because they do not observe DT. They're three hours time difference from Sydney...kind of like LA to Boston, but only two hours behind AEST.

About 200 people on the border between Central and Western Australia, observe CWT... that's Central Western Time... 1 hour and 45 minutes behind AEST. They do not observe DST, but then...why would they?