It’s been a busy couple of weeks for me — hence my brief absence from Lockergnome IT Pros. I was in Las Vegas last week for a quick vacation in honor of my wife’s birthday. Played a Texas Hold ‘Em tournament at Planet Hollywood Casino and came in third place. You can read about all my adventures on my personal blog.

Last weekend, as you know, was the “Spring Forward” time under the “new” DST rules. Many of my clients are smartphone users, and I’d worked with them at the beginning of this, last year when the “Fall Back” shift was moved ahead. I’d helped many of them patch their devices, which included BlackBerries and Windows-Mobile powered devices, such as Treo 750s. I did this before the DST shift. So I was a little surprised when a couple of my clients contacted me at the beginning of the week to say their calendars were displaying everything behind an hour, not reflecting the time change to an hour forward. Why was I surprised? Because I’d already patched these devices last year.

I did some quick digging, and it appeared that Microsoft issued a Windows Mobile patch for the 2008 portion to the DST patch. This is in addition to the first patch, which addressed the Fall 2007 DST shift. The instructions for downloading and installing the patch were not very clear, and I myself don’t have a Windows Mobile device to experiment with, so it took a little trial and error for my clients to get the patch applied. But we collectively figured it out, and their Treo 750s soon displayed correctly for calendar items.

I was irked, however, that Microsoft seemingly issued this in two separate patches, instead of one patch — the one that was applied last year. Did anybody else out there have similar experiences? I know that older BlackBerry devices only needed the single patch — one that could easily be applied directly to the device over-the-air.