Forget Black Friday and Boxing Day: In the world of POS, the Friday before Christmas is the busiest day of the year

Oh, yes. The Friday before Christmas. That was yesterday.

If you’re in the point-of-sale business, as Moneris Solutions is, the busiest day of the year for transactions is usually going to be the Friday before Christmas – not Black Friday or Boxing Day. The exception might be when Christmas falls on a Saturday and the Friday before Christmas is Christmas Eve, Dec. 24. In that case, the Friday is falling too close to Christmas to be the busiest day of the year for point-of-sale vendors.  While you get last-minute shoppers Christmas Eve, many stores, at least the ones not owned-and-operated by proprietors named Ebenezer, are thinking about closing by mid-afternoon or shortly after Christmas Eve.

The reason the Friday before Christmas is the biggest bonanza of the year for debit and credit processors, is the huge volume of sales, not so much in high-end items such as big screen TV’s, which dominate Black Friday and Boxing Day sales, but rather smaller items such as groceries and liquor, that rack up record numbers for the year.

I worked briefly for Moneris back in 2005 and 2006 and was there for the Friday before Christmas in December 2005, which that year fell on Dec. 23, which while obviously not as late as Christmas Eve the following day, is still pretty late in the festive game for retailers.

In the Maritimes, Moneris Solutions is located in the old red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte St. in Sackville, New Brunswick.  I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick building, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, working in a business that is very much built on proprietary data where you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk,” took some getting used to. Documents had to be turned face down when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift.  Perhaps something like working on Area 51 or at Groom Lake, Nevada, I remember speculating to myself at the time.

My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hot dog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly.

Things like proximity or prox contactless cards with RFID (radio frequency identification) embedded chips, copper antenna coil, and capacitor, with each chip-card storing a unique binary number, were just arriving on the Canadian retail scene, while tokenization, which dated back to 1976 in the payment card industry (PCI), was also starting to make a real mark by 2005.

Tokenization is the concept of using a non-decryptable piece of data to represent, by reference, sensitive or secret data. In the payment card industry context, tokens are used to reference cardholder data that is managed in a tokenization system, application or off-site secure facility.

To protect data over its full life cycle, tokenization is often combined with end-to-end encryption to secure data in transit to the tokenization system or service, with a token replacing the original data on return. For example, to avoid the risks of malware stealing data from low-trust systems such as point of sale (POS) systems, as in the Target breach of 2013, cardholder data encryption must take place prior to card data entering the POS and not after. Encryption takes place within the confines of a security hardened and validated card reading device and data remains encrypted until received by the processing host, an approach pioneered by Heartland Payment Systems as a means to secure payment data from advanced threats, now widely adopted by industry payment processing companies and technology companies. The PCI Council has also specified end-to-end encryption (certified point-to-point encryption—P2PE) for various service implementations in various PCI Council Point-to-point encryption documents. 

Tokenization and “classic” encryption effectively protect data if implemented properly, and an ideal security solution will use both. While similar in certain regards, tokenization and classic encryption differ in a few key aspects. Both are cryptographic data security methods and they essentially have the same function, however they do so with differing processes and have different effects on the data they are protecting. 

Tokenization is a non-mathematical approach that replaces sensitive data with non-sensitive substitutes without altering the type or length of data. This is an important distinction from encryption because changes in data length and type can render information unreadable in intermediate systems such as databases. Tokenized data is secure yet it can still be processed by legacy systems which makes tokenization more flexible than classic encryption.

Another difference is that tokens require significantly less computational resources to process. With tokenization, specific data is kept fully or partially visible for processing and analytics while sensitive information is kept hidden. This allows tokenized data to be processed more quickly and reduces the strain on system resources. This can be a key advantage in systems that rely on high performance.

My old boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, and who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering roll out of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank.

Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

Libraries and hotels: Different sectors, but value-added information is a hot, proprietary commodity for both

In late 2006 and early 2007, I did some work in Trenton, Ontario for TeleTech Holdings Inc., an Englewood, Colorado-based company, as a high-speed Internet specialist offering technical support to their client, St. Louis-based Charter Communications, owned not by Bill Gates, but by Microsoft’s less famous co-founder, Paul Allen. The facility, which had just opened in May 2006 with more than 200 employees, had superb computers and desks and chairs, which ergonomically would put to shame any newsroom I’ve ever worked in.

Sadly, TeleTech closed that Trenton facility on Aug. 31, 2009, little more than two years after I arrived in Thompson, Manitoba. Why? “There is a change in the needs of the client. The work will be moved around to other centres,” TeleTech explained, adding the closure is “not a reflection” of quality of work completed at the Trenton centre. The closure came sandwiched somewhere between Outsourced, the 2006 romantic movie comedy, which won the best film award at the 2007 Seattle International Film Festival, and the one-season NBC sitcom by the same name that aired in 2010-11, telling the story of a fictional all-American company, Mid America Novelties of Seattle, outsourcing its call centre operation to Gharapuri in India.

Apparently newspapers aren’t the only type of business to go out of business. Or outsource their work to India. Although in the news biz it is more likely to be layout and production work, increasingly editing, and to a limited degree, at least so far, local reporting. The old real estate adage, “location, location, location,” which once seemed to apply to community newspapers, as much as your home, as where both were located was the most important factor in giving them value, in the case of papers for what was thought to be a unique commodity – local news – not so much anymore. Still, call me a Luddite, but it is hard to picture local council and school board meetings being covered remotely from 12 time zones away. Technically possible, yes; But likely on a wide scale? Probably not, although it has been done with some fairly unimpressive results to date.

Not long before I worked for TeleTech, I spent some time in 2005 and 2006 living in Amherst, Nova Scotia and Sackville, New Brunswick, both on the saltwater Tantramar marshes, and worked as a financial agent at Moneris Solutions in Sackville. I always marvelled at how I could walk into the lunchroom at Moneris in the remodeled red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street, and pick up a hard copy of the Harvard Business Review off a shelf to read at lunch, or maybe chat over lunch with a fraud detection specialist about things like the language of a purchaser one of our merchants was dealing with half-way around the world being different from the primary language spoken in the location where the true IP is registered, etc., raising red flags for us. The other nice thing about both Moneris and TeleTech was they were “inbound” call centres – the client is calling you for help, as apposed to “outbound.” If you want to know the difference, ask a telemarketer.

My Moneris boss, Tom Rusted, had a M.Sc. in entomology, and was a black fly specialist, who in a career as a banker, had been involved in the pioneering rollout of mbanx in 1996 for Bank of Montreal, which was the first North America-wide virtual, full-service bank. Moneris Solutions, established in 2000, is a joint investment between RBC Royal Bank and BMO Bank of Montreal, and with more than three billion transactions a year from over 350,000 merchant locations, is Canada’s largest processor and acquirer of debit and credit card payments.

Moneris was a very different world than journalism, but not uninteresting by any means. I met a number of very bright and talented people at Moneris. Mind you, like the hotel industry where I devote my efforts now (along with the university library), Moneris is very much built on proprietary data – as much or even more so than the hotel business – and you couldn’t leave your computer without doing a “lock-and-walk.” Documents had to be turned facedown when you went away from your desk because there could be non-employee contractors or visitors in the building, although I can’t recall them letting many visitors in. Documents had to be paper shredded at the end of every shift. I remember not so long ago Googling the remodeled Moneris red brick historic Atlantic Wholesalers building at 2 Charlotte Street and no images came up for it! Sort of like Area 51 or Groom Lake, Nevada. My favourite story from that line of work was having a food and beverage manager from the Calgary Saddledome (now known as the Scotiabank Saddledome) call me at Moneris in Sackville because one of his concession clerks the night before at a Calgary Flames NHL hockey game had sold a fan a hotdog or something for $7 (in 2005-06) and the customer had paid by debit card.

The transaction had gone through not as $7 but $70,000 – immediately, of course, out of the customer’s bank account, courtesy of our Moneris point-of-sale (POS) hand-held terminal device.

Too many zeroes punched in, I guess. The manager was totally beside himself, desperate to refund the customer and credit his bank account before he found out about the mistake. It would have been a lot simpler, of course, if he had paid with a credit card, not a debit card, because you wouldn’t need the credit cardholder physically present with their card to do the refund, unlike a debit card. Although even a credit refund for $70,000 wouldn’t be that simple given the staggering sum.

I remember the manager asking me how it could possibly have been approved on our end and gone through and telling him presumably the customer had the $70,000 in the bank account linked to his debit card, and the bank had obviously not imposed a daily withdrawal limit for him, like most customer have. The poor manager said, “I’m not even sure I could get a mortgage right now for $70,000, much less buy something on my debit card for that amount.” I told him maybe do a quick refresher with his clerk on punching in numbers on the Moneris terminal keypad a bit more slowly. One of my favourite non-journalism true work stories.

Whether community newspapers can continue to monetize with much success their local information remains something of an open question, but much of the rest of the world is ever increasingly living on proprietary data and value-added information. For hotels, think cloud-based hotel property management systems.

But the phenomenon is, of course, much, much bigger than the for-profit private sector payment processing and hotel industries. Here at the university library, where we’re part of the institutional not-for-profit public sector, we’re also always dealing with proprietary information and data, albeit of a different type sometimes, in terms of copyright and intellectual property issues. Make no mistake; libraries monetize information. Want an inside-the-ballpark library term? Think GOBI3 (Global Online Bibliographic Information).

GOBI3 is an information source and bibliographic database that enables research libraries and consortia to have access to print and electronic titles.

A company called EBSCO, founded in 1944 and headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, supplies a fee-based online research service with 375 full-text databases, a collection of 600,000-plus e-books, subject indexes, point-of-care medical references, and an array of historical digital archives. Last February, EBSCO bought Yankee Book Peddler, Inc. (YBP Library Services), located in Contoocook, New Hampshire, and founded in 1971 as a bookseller for academic libraries, providing books, collection management, and technical services in print and electronic formats to academic, research, and special libraries in the United States and internationally. There is also Midwest Library Service, out of Bridgeton, Missouri, a book jobber serving libraries since 1959.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone: Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 8

As government news releases go, this “media bulletin” sent to me, and no doubt many others via e-mail by the the province at 11:32 a.m. yesterday, sort of stretches the old journalistic notion of the word “bulletin” connoting some sense of urgency. “Daylight saving time returns to Manitoba early in the morning of Sunday, March 8, when clocks across the province will be advanced by one hour,” says the lede (journalism-speak for opening sentence or paragraph).

“Under the Official Time Act, daylight saving time begins on the second Sunday in March and continues until the first Sunday in November.

“The official time change to daylight saving time occurs at 2 a.m., Sunday, March 8 at which time clocks should be set ahead to 3 a.m.”

While it has been gradually remaining lighter later in the evening since late December here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re about to get an even bigger early evening light boost Sunday. Tonight the sun sets at 6:19 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST). Tomorrow sunset here is at 7:21 p.m. Central Daylight Saving Time (CDT).  Presto! In the course of a single day, we’ve picked up another hour and two minutes of daylight in the evening. And by the time the spring equinox arrives March 20 here in Thompson, Manitoba at latitude 55.7433° N, we’ll be seeing about the same amount of hours of daylight as night,  with sunrise at 7:35 a.m, and sunset at 7:46 p.m. Come the summer solstice June 21, don’t be surprised if we’re out on the dock at the Paint Lake Marina, a bit south of here, fishing until almost 11 p.m., as sunset won’t be until 10:26 p.m.

For this, we can thank George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sandford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But  on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.  Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in  Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to  the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous  … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a  longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as  cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by  Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October.  The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.

The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are  on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also used DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer,  keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone. Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSRm80WzZk

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

George Vernon Hudson, Daylight Saving Time and the coming Hour of Ambiguity Nov. 2

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in late  October is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sanford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.
Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But  on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.  Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in  Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to  the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous  … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a  longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as  cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by  Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October.  The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.  The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are  on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also used DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer,  keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

This year, we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 2, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explains that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas he added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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