<rant>Daylight saving time is an outdated concept, a complete nuisance and should be abolished.</rant>

I’m in the UK and I have a call with a Microsoft Product Group in Redmond (WA) tonight at 12:00 PST. US Pacific time is 8 hours ahead of the UK, and we’re both on daylight savings and in the northern hemisphere… or so I thought (I’m still pretty sure about the northern hemisphere bit).

LiveMeeting tells me that the meeting has not started yet and to wait until the scheduled meeting time before trying again, so I checked the current time in the US and sure enough it’s only 11:00 on the west coast… then I checked the meeting request and saw that Google Calendar had picked up the time as UTC/GMT +7 (which is correct) but in the summer the UK time is not Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) but British Summer Time (BST) and somehow (possibly by Google Calendar, possibly by Microsoft Outlook, possibly by me), the iCalendar (.ics) file that Microsoft provided when I registered for the event had been mangled and my calendar only had a 7 hour time difference. Still, at least I was early not late…

In future, I’ll be making good use of the other link in the e-mail from Microsoft – the world clock timezone converter – which takes into account daylight saving time (DST) as well as the local time zone.