I was woken by an brief but intrusive buzzing at two this morning. Before I could work out what it was, however, it stopped.

I fell back to sleep.

About a quarter of an hour later, it woke me again.

This time, I was disturbed enough to find the offending device. I spotted the glow of my Palm T3’s screen from behind its cover, and seized it. I had set it to silent mode, so, instead of the normal ‘bee-boo bee-boo bee-boo’ alert chimes, it was employing the vibration alarm, which rattled loudly against the hard surface. But why was it rousing me at this wee small hour?

It wanted to boast that it had correctly made the transition to summer time. Or, more accurately, the idiot-savant programmers at Palm had wanted it to.

Given that, as far as I know, the switch to daylight savings time happens in the middle of the night everywhere, the question is: what were Palm developers thinking when they decided that the event needed to be announced with an alert?!