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Old 11-04-2006, 08:43 PM
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wejones wejones is offline
Cranky Crumudgeon
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On my browser, the time is listed in UTC, but as you say, off by 12 hours. It looks like it's been this way for a long time. I remember noticing this once before. I just looked back at the listing of my past posts, and I see that the times are off as far back as I checked (I checked back to September).
I've done this on my own computer a few times, but I usually catch the problem within a few weeks.

Talk about weird time though, I have one of those WWV clocks sitting next to me here, and every spring/fall when the standard vs daylight time changes, it automatically changes to the new time, however for some reason, when the time gets to midnight UTC after the change, which is 7 or 8 the next evening, suddenly my clock gets confused, and the dials start spinning around, and it evenually stops at the old time (ie in the fall it would have reverted back to EDT instead of EST). Then, after local midnight, it goes crazy again, and reverts back to the proper time, then at 7 or 8 in the evening it goes back to daylight time. Usually after 2 days of this, it settles down on the proper time zone. Really weird, but it does this every spring/fall since I've had the clock (I've had it for about 6 years). I'm convinced that it is confused by the change from AM to PM in UTC. Ie since this clock (and this is true for a lot of computer systems) receives it's time signals in UTC, but at say 8:05 in the evening, it is AM of a different day in UTC, so if say my computer, or the computer in my clock is trying to figure out whether it is AM or PM, or even what day it is, it can get confusing. I know that this can get confusing, because I have written several computer programs that track satellites using the AF elements, and it usually takes me a lot of experimentation to get the time conversions working properly, and very often I would find myself off by 12 or 24 hours, and would be confused when my program would be saying the sats were in the wrong place. I found it amazing that I could write a program that computed sidereal time and track sun/moon and satellites, but I couldn't keep AM/PM straight.
Kind of like needing a 6 year old to program a VCR, the more sophistocated electronics get, the harder it is to determine what time it is.
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