Since I got the iPad I’ve been using this really cool facility called dropbox.com to keep the articles I’m currently working on in sync between the iPad and the main computer. You get 2GB of storage for free, and it has been quite transparent in operation.
Last night I was working on an article late, typing it on the iPad. Much to my surprise, when I checked the computer this morning it hadn’t been updated. In fact, the last update was at 3:39pm yesterday. I checked my bit of dropbox.com, and found that the website also only held this older copy. Only after fiddling around and rebooting did I find that somehow the iPad’s date was set to March this year! Then I realised that I’d been looking around in its settings yesterday, trying to find some way of having it automatically sync its time with some Internet time service. It’s quite possible that I’d accidentally flicked one of the rolling numbers on the setting screen by mistake. Ease of use can sometimes result in ease of stuffing up.
I set the clock to the correct time, and now it works fine. Except that when I check the time on my Windows machine, it also was set to March. So now I’m confused.