Last night was the first change of the clocks since I got my latest radio-synchronised alarm clock.

This clock, unlike its predecessor, is unable to walk and think at the same time. Or rather, it's unable to both display the time and synchronise itself with radio signals; so once every 24 hours it shuts its time display down while it listens carefully to the radio for up to 15 minutes before being satisfied it's got it right. And it has to do this only once a day, because shutting the time down is annoying and has to be minimised.

It turns out, in a staggering display of careful, attentive-to-detail design, that the time of day at which it chooses to do that is just before the radio signal adjusts when the clocks go forward or back. So my alarm clock is still wrong today, though it will presumably be right tomorrow. Or at least it had better be.

Good grief, who can have thought that up? It's not even as if you need to fully comprehend the MSF signal to know the clocks have changed: there's a one-bit DST flag broadcast every minute.

While I'm ranting, I'm also not fond of the way the clock change is officially mandated to happen. Instead of having certain times of day sometimes happen twice or not at all, it'd have been much better if they'd arranged that the hour between (say) 1am and 2am either went at double speed or at half speed, but remained monotonic. The only possible excuse is that the people who devised the current scheme had never heard of cron(1).

(Of course, on this particular occasion it doesn't actually matter if my alarm clock is still wrong tomorrow, since I'm off work for two weeks and won't have to get up anyway :-)