Since when was WET a thing?

I grew up with GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, still the legal term in the UK) which was replaced for technical considerations by UTC (co-ordinated universal time) because the former isn't defined specifically enough in scientific terms.  UTC has become more obvious with the rise of the computer age because time servers use it to synchronise times between different computer systems.

WET is apparently "Western European Time," comprising the UK, Ireland, Portugal and a few other places - in other words, GMT, or UTC+0 in technical terms.  Presumably use of WET within the UK is at least in part political, wishing to identify a pro-European mindset (with a direct comparison to how different time zones are used in the US, for example).  In an international sense, using WET can only identify a pro-European mindset, as it makes more sense to use UTC+(hour) as a) it's already in common international usage, b) it ignores daylight saving fluctuations - not all WET area members will be on WET at the same time - and therefore c) it's obvious to anyone looking at UTC+(hour) what local time it actually represents, which is really the whole point.

The big downside to using neologistic terms like WET, CET, EET etc. is the same as the use of the US equivalents - if you're not American, do you know how many hours UTC differs from, say, Mountain Time?  Do you even know which areas of the US run on Mountain Time?  Tell me an area uses UTC-7 however, and I know exactly what time it is there, irrespective of the time of year.

Infrequent!

Happy New Year!  I knew it'd been a while since I posted but I didn't think it'd been a month.  Ho hum.

In my defence, there's a new blog in the blogosphere where I've been spending some of my time - the Haiku blog, which is a joint effort with my sister.  It's been surprisingly fun so far.  The only other outlet I've had for haikuing (good word, if a little vowel heavy) has been Creatures Caves, and those have really been only the creatures-related ones.  There's no reason they couldn't be posted here I suppose - but collaborative projects are always good.  (Well, I say always.  That might be a bit optimistic, but let's leave at that in the spirit of the season.)

No real resolutions this year: that always seems like a recipe for disaster.  The only thing I really did want to get done this year was read (on average) a book a week; this was prompted by cleaning the bookshelves before Christmas and seeing how many books I have that I either haven't read or want to read again.  So, this year is the year!  I'll create a new page to hold the details.

Thinking about it, there are several other things that I want to get done this year.  I've gone back to HabitRPG to try and keep focused on certain tasks; I'd given up on it when it went haywire with new updates before Christmas, but I've just cleared everything out and started again.  It's still very random in places, and working things break as frequently as other bugs are fixed (one gets the impression of infinite monkeys with infinite laptops) but once it settles down a bit (assuming it ever does) I'll do a review.  If I don't swear off it in frustration first, that is.

Also - once a month really isn't enough to update a blog.  It's not that I don't have things I want to blog about, it's that I'm not making time for it.  Partly this is because it falls into the "fun/frivolous" category.  That said, I want to work on being kinder to me and less type A this year, so maybe making time for blogging will help.