Best of the blogs: Just who is behind the Daylight Savings Time change, anyway? Ted Samson has an idea about that. “Call me a conspiracy theorist, if you like … Starbucks, Peet’s, and other caffeine dealers of the United States certainly stand to gain from an extra 15 days of bleary-eyed commuters staggering to the office an hour earlier — not to mention IT admins who’ll be staying up late patching OSes and applications that aren’t yet prepped,” he posits in New Daylight Savings Time not so bright an idea. “I’d like to be more excited about the prospect, but I’m afraid it’s just going to prove to be little more than a poorly planned, token effort.” Columnist’s corner: Either way, IT shops had better be ready. “If you’re hearing cries of ‘What do we do?!’ from the executive floors feel free to throw a scornful glance or two. Bottom line: If they’re complaining now, those guys waited too long,” Oliver Rist explains in Dark before Daylight Savings. Chances are, though, if Mahogany Row is asking, especially at the eleventh hour, you in IT will be drafted into action. Tick. Tock. “You’re stuck using what you’ve got,” Rist adds. That means your centralized management software toolbox. Start tracking down DST patches from your vendors. Oh yes, and don’t forget to double check everything. IT Troubleshooter: BMC, CA, HP and IBM are hippos; at least that’s what Harper Mann asserts in The piranha effect. By some accounts hippos kill more people in Africa every year than lions, elephants, leopards, buffaloes and rhinos combined. That said, the vendors, like hippos, are potentially vulnerable to the flesh-eating fish, which in the systems management river tend to look a lot like, umm, open source pioneers. GroundWork, for one, is marshalling a school of projects including Nagios, RRDtool and Ganglia, which when “stitched together, these projects solve systems and network management problems for larger and smaller companies alike,” Mann explains, “whereas HP OpenView and its cousins are overkill for all but the largest 2,000 enterprises in the world.” Technology Industry