Engineering at Dordt College

Remember when we were all told that we needed to patch our computer’s operating systems and our programs and make sure we had printed bank statements and all that because when the date changed from 1999 to 2000 we were going to have trouble? Well, we have done something like it again. Congress has changed the dates on which daylight savings time starts and stops. Again the news is that we better be up-to-date on all our patches etc. I find it interesting. I’m concluding that there are some limits to the amount of detail that we should computerize. Here’s another example. I had a friend’s telephone number on a speed-dial button on my telephone. It was a long-distance call and I had programmed in my calling card number (remember those?) the 1 and area code– the whole thing. I thought it was really neat. All I had to do was press one button and the speed dialer would do the work of pressing about 30 keystrokes, even pausing at the right times to enter my PIN number and so forth. Then one day I got a new phone. I had not written down his phone number. That old telephone with the speed dialer had no display so I could not recover the number from that phone. Then I realized that my reliance on the speed dialer had a limitation. Now I find these things happening over and over. Got a new computer? Want your e-mail address book transferred? That might be work! How about your itunes and photos? All those gigabytes will need to be moved too. Maybe a stack of CD’s would be more durable in the long run. But maybe not. Right now I have no answers, but I think the question of how much detail to store, like when daylight savings time starts and stops, is an interesting one.