# Going UTC

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2007-04-15T11:53:46Z


objUTC = new Object;objUTC.wtsclock = "wtsclock024.swf";objUTC.color = "6495ED";objUTC.wtsid = "UTC";objUTC.width = 200;objUTC.height = 200;objUTC.wmode = "transparent";showClock(objUTC);UTCI'm so sick of time zones and daylight savings and my blog posts being all funky because of it. I've tried it before, but haven't been able to do it well. I'm going to try it again. I'm setting the clock on my computer to UTC and would like people to tell use UTC with me when appropriate. For instance, when scheduling telephone calls.

It actually makes it much easier if you convert to UTC for me. There are too many moving parts otherwise. In the southern hemisphere, the daylight savings goes the opposite direction of daylight savings in the north. In addition, different countries switch on different days. Then there are countries like Japan that don't observe daylight savings. So when people try to tell me to do something in some country, it sometimes requires two lookups - any adjustments in my country and any adjustments in the original country. Using UTC reduces the chance of error by forcing people to only track the +/- UTC in their own time zone. At least that's the theory.

Time and Date.com and The World Time Server are good sites for checking what time it is anywhere and Aion is a good OS X menubar thingie to show you all of the times in various time zones. Haven't tested for the preciseness of the daylight savings switches, but seemed OK the last time around.

UPDATE: Does anyone know of a good authoritative list of time zones and daylight savings switchover dates?





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