As from today, 26 October 2008, the Mauritians have advanced their clocks by one hour. This is a result from the application of the daylight saving time (DST). A new initiative from the local government in order to reduce energy consumption in the country.
This concept of DST was introduced by William Willet in 1905. As he pointed out, DST does not change the length of the day but an opportunity to increase outdoor leisure activities during afternoon sunlight hours.
From a personal perspective, I can say that I am adapting to this situation. I wake up at 6.45 am (which would have been equivalent to 5.45 without DST), which is quite early for me. I just hope that it will remain like this through out the mauritius DST period. For a practical use, I did not change my clock at 2.00 am this morning. I did it just before going to sleep. I was planning to sleep from 23:00 till 07:00, so what was the use for me to wake up in the middle of my sleep only to chnage the time. Maybe that was what help me for the adaptation to that mauritian DST. As soon as I changed the clock by 1 hour, I started to feel sleepy.
There are some practical issues from this mauritius DST. Since mauritius was not using any DST in the past and as such there were no DST rules for mauritius. No rules simply mean no implementation into windows. So we need to manually change the timezone, until microsoft include an update for this, which will be in december 2008. Another issue is the use of satellites television. The programmation is normally delayed by exactly 24 hour or sometimes in live. This would normally be a slight shift in 1 hour, but until the 28 of october. After that they will apply their onw DST and there will be a lag of 2 hours.
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