Several years ago, maybe in the summer of 2009, I invested a small fortune with one of the firms that provided correlation and production services to migrate my Word-based resume to XML so that I could develop it for both professional and personal purposes. The service included a ‘free’ copy of XResume for Linux (which turned out to be open source anyway) that made life much easier when trying to separate personal preferences from my career history. No point showing a strong interest in Poker when applying for that CFO job. Incidentally, this firm actually had a physical presence in New York, with a floor in one of the huge new business towers in Harlem.

 

Last year I subscribed to MeetU2.com’s latest version of ViralMeeting, which immediately scoured my XML resume, my recently opened documents, my contact list and my entries in LinkedIn and eCademy to set up suggested short, 10 minute meetings with people that it thought I might have an interest in talking to. I suppose I accepted maybe 20% of those suggested, out of which less than half were developed to a point where something beneficial happened. But it was interesting now and then to find out what other people were doing, and usually we knew someone in common due to LinkedIn. So this continued for about a year until last week when the whole system appeared to fall apart. I saw a suggested meeting with someone for 10am on Monday which I accepted. MeetU2 showed that the other party had accepted as well, but at 10am my phone didn’t ring. Since I was busy at the time I didn’t really mind, but then it failed to ring for the next two suggested calls as well.

 

Yesterday, my RSS news feed aggregator had a link to a news article that explained the problem. The US government had determined (similar to the ill-fated experiment in 2007) that energy savings would be obtained by altering the Daylight Saving Time move by three weeks, thereby saving approximately 0.001% of the estimated total annual carbon-based fuel pollution output. Laudable, of course, but the technology impact was not considered. It turned out that Verizon and other phones needed to a new chip to account for the new calendar, online and enterprise calendars had to be updated manually by an administrator, and to make it worse, nobody fully understood whether the patches needed to be applied immediately or at the time of the time change. Many enterprise users also didn’t know whether their systems had been patched, especially when using multiple access devices – desktop, home PC, Blackberry, Trio etc. The world was off by one hour. In some places. Maybe. Unless both parties were fully patched. Conversations along the lines of “OK, so we’re meeting an hour earlier than is shown, at 9am. Is that 9am your time or mine?” were commonplace.

 

Anyway, full credit to MeetU2 who jumped at the chance generated by the confusion to introduce a new feature. I can now click on a button in the task bar to indicate that I am ‘not busy’ and the application goes off and finds other potential contacts who are not busy and suggests an immediate meeting, thereby by-passing the calendar problem. The button automatically shows ‘busy’ again after 15 minutes.

 

That’s it for now, more updates yesterday, or tomorrow.