It’s time to adjust the clocks in Europe again.

Tonight (or tomorrow morning if you will) clocks will be advanced from 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. when daylight-saving-time begins in Europe this spring.

That means we (including me) lose one hour that we don’t get back until next fall when daylight-savings-time in Europe will end on Sunday, October 31, 2010. (Of course we will get it back without interest being paid. Maybe we’ll save a bit on the electric bill, but I’m not really sure about that.)


Attention to you folks in the USA and Canada: The time difference to Europe will get back to normal again.

Here are some examples to demonstrate the ‘usual time differences’ between USA, Canada and Europe.

America	Europe	Time Difference [hours]
New York	London	5
	Berlin	6
Chicago	London	6
	Berlin	7
Denver	London	7
	Berlin	8
Los Angeles	London	8
	Berlin	9
Example: 10 a.m. in Denver is 6 p.m. in Berlin

You’ll find additional information and tools at timeanddate.com (↑).

• Daylight Saving Time–first half of 2010 (↑)
• Daylight Saving Time–second half of 2010 (↑)
  
  
• Overview over start and end times for 2010 (↑)

_____
Browsing tip: Links designated with (↑) will open in a new browser window.

I think the next transition is on April 4th, when daylight-saving-time ends this year in Australia.

Kind of confusing, isn’t it.

Have a ‘short’ night sleep
(if you are in Europe.)

Yours
John W. Furst

I just have read a not so bad blog post. However, when I checked out the about page I got turned off.

“This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.”

Come on. You can do better than that.
And you should.

Anybody who is getting serious about putting your blog in their RSS reader or subscribe to your e-mail list will want to know more about you.

The about page is a great place to let your readers know who you are, what you can do for them, and why they should listen to you.

But first things first.

Some Ideas For An Entrepreneurial About Page

• You have a name, haven’t you. Use it. Introduce yourself with a short bio. … or introduce each team member who writes in the blog on a regular basis.
  
  
• Of course we want to see your photo(s). A nice photograph makes it more personal. You do not want to miss this step.
  
  
• What problems can you help the readers with?
  
  
• Why are you qualified to help them?
  
  
• Tell them how they can stay in touch with you. An optin form on the about page i snot such a bad idea. However, remember the good rule of thumb: “One page, one action.” Don’t offer too much.
  
  
• By the way: Have you ever thought of putting a personal video message (↑) on your about page? I guess, it’s time to do that.

Now go to work.
You don’t have to get it perfect.
5 % better than your competitors will do.


Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: I just realize I should update the about page of my own as, well.

P.P.S.: In the context of legal issues with online publishing, you MUST NOT have an anonymous blog anyway. Pen names are fine, but readers, customers, and the government must be able to contact you based on the information on your website without having to go through hoops. (I’m not a lawyer. This is not legal advice!)

P.P.P.S.: Do you have anything to add? Any comments? I am sure you have. Let me know.

Daylight savings time has started in the USA (↑) today.

In Europe it will begin in two weeks, and it will end in Australia in three weeks.

Especially if you are in Europe you could easily miss online events in the USA during the next two weeks.

Be aware of those time changes when planning or attending online events.

Here is why.

For example, when it is 1pm in New York it is usually 6pm in London. Between March 14 and March 27, 2010, however, it will be 5pm in London, only 4 hours later.



Then on March 28 daylight savings time will rule on both continents and time difference will be the usual 5 hours till the clocks will be reset in fall of 2010, again.

Life could be easier if daylight savings time were changed on the same weekends all over the world, but that's not the case.

To make things worse, Hawaii (and many other regions in the world) don't observe daylight savings time at all. On top of that Australia and New Zealand are on the southern hemisphere. While we start daylight savings time in the North, Australia will end it on April 4, 2010.

Tip: TimeAndDate.com (↑) offers detailed information and tools. Like a timezone converter, etc., …

Personally I am adding timezone information to event details. Don't leave room for assumptions. Don't assume your readers are educated about timezones, it's your job to communicate in a way they understand easily.

Here is an example for unambiguous event information.

Webinar starts on Friday, March 12, 2010 at 3:30 p.m. EST (UTC-05) as in New York, USA

or

Teleclass starts on Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 3:30 p.m. EDT (UTC-04) as in New York, USA.

Note: EST is Eastern Standard Time and EDT is Eastern Daylight Savings Time.

Yours
John W. Furst

P.S.: Especially US marketers seem to be unaware of — or lazy about — timezone issues that go beyond Eastern versus Pacific time. Check out my previous post on this subject: Email Marketing And Troubles With Timezones.

Screen Dark, Data Lost?
Not For Me – Thanks to UPS

Did it ever happen to you? You are working on a complicated spreadsheet on your computer and all of a sudden… power is out. The screen gets dark, silence follows, and you might hear your neighbor through the wall shout out loud, “Oh, shit!”

I got used to those power outages lasting from 30 seconds to 1 hour. Like during the recent heavy rainfalls in early December. In 95% of all cases power comes back in less than 5 minutes.

• Other people suffer data loss.
• Some people even had their hard drives crash or other hardware damaged (Ouch!)

I am not one of them.

After moving to the Canaries I quickly realized that electric power is not as stable as in the big cities where I lived earlier.

Therefore, I got myself a UPS (uninterrupted power supply), a kind of a battery that keeps supplying your PC and monitor with juice even when power fails. Usually you can run up to 15 minutes on battery power with your normal PC or Mac setup.

The reason for writing this article is I want to share with you what I have learned about UPS during the last three years. I just replaced my UPS with a new one because the battery died.

Update: Just added a “How To Video” going through the process.

It's inside the blog post.

What a surprise — for the first time I got search results surfed by Microsoft's Bing search engine. And I did not even intend that. All I wanted to do was to find a particular project for a Wave client (software) I read about on the Web. I typed my query into the address bar, hit enter, and got these results below.

Not necessarily what I was looking for. But wait a second … Why didn't Firefox serve the result from Google as usually?

Well, I played around with Bing a tiny bit, right when Microsoft had launched their new search service but I did not stick with it for long. Honestly, Google is my most favorite search engine. Period. Google did not only catch me for search, but with a plethora of other great applications. From Gmail, to Google Docs, AdWords, … to their translation tool, and … Wave is the latest on the list. They hooked me up. Probably for life.

So I was quite surprised that I suddenly got Bing results displayed.

What has happened?

I remember that I had updated my Alexa Sparky add-on for Firefox this week. I also remember having seen a note about new features but I kind of ignored it. Now, it's obvious what had happened. Alexa Sparky is one of the FireFox Add-ons I use.

Do you have Google Toolbar With Sidewiki installed?

If yes, please, watch the navigation bar of your browser.

I am using Firefox and noticed a hashtag after the URL in many instances. Not always, so I am not sure about a pattern, yet. When I turn Sidewiki off in the toolbar this effect disappears. Here is the proof.



Google Toolbar Seems To Interfere With Other Browser Add-ons