[conspire] A matter of time (zones and changes)

[Rick Moen]

This past day, the San Francisco Bay Area, where _most_ CABAL regulars
live, went from UTC-7 ("Pacific Daylight Time") to UTC-8 ("Pacific
Standard Time").  However, it apparently came as a surprise to at least
one of our members in Western Canada that, for the first time in a long
time, Canada's western provinces -- British Columbia, Alberta, and
Saskatchewan -- have _not_ follow suit.

I see in the news that those provinces' governments recently decided to
jettison the twice-annual madness, and remain on daylight time
year-round.  FWIW, I rather like this idea, and hope it is contagious.
;->  However, for the time being, it is not.

Getting to the main point:  Memo to our honoured members in British
Columbia:  Please do note carefully starting times of CABAL meetings
(e.g., on Jitsi Meet) going forward:   I always carefully state (in
meeting announcement) the UTC offset of that time, and never assume
that ambiguous terms like "Pacific Daylight Time" have meaning outside
the USA -- which was a good call, as, now, they don't.  Because our
neighbours are sovereign countries, and three cheers for that1


On another note:  Last night, we ran smack-dab against a new restriction
on meet.jit.si, where all sessions are limited to 95 minutes.  We
improvised a gradual migration from room CABAL to CABAL2, CABAL3,
CABAL4, and CABAL5, which got us to local-to-me midnight.  And, wow,
that is very not ideal -- so, I'll be spending some time trying to find
a better way to cope.  However, for now, that's how we cope.  Be
advised.

Note that we/I could end-run this restriction by standing up my own
private Jitsi Meet instance, specifically for CABAL.  It's not really
difficult, and I did this once (with Michael Paoli's help) when the 2020
World Science Fiction Convention in Wellington, NZ was suddenly obliged
by COVID to convert to virtual-only.  I could, y'know, do that on a
local bitty box (Jitsi Meet is open source Java code), and configure it
the way CABAL wants.