[AG-TECH] Bridgeport Room Reservations / Time standards

[Don Morton]

Hello, may I please reserve the Bridgeport Room for 2100-0200 UTC
on the following Wednesdays:

28 March, 4 April, 11 April, 18 April, 2 May, 9 May, 30 May.

This will be used by Arctic Region Supercomputing Centre and U.
Montana Missoula (and others) for SC Global, AGN courses, etc.
planning meetings.

At this time, I'd like to make the humble recommendation that we
start using UTC (also known as GMT or Zulu) as a common time
reference for AGN activities.  As a non-Easterner who deals
with Alaska collaborators, I've found it quite confusing to 
figure out when rooms are available, having to convert between
Eastern or Central time, Mountain time, and Alaska time.  My
guess is that once there are active international sites, this
will become impossible (or, at the very least, quite error-prone).

With a common UTC standard, everybody only needs to understand THEIR
relation to the standard.  For those of you in North America, if you're
on Standard time, the conversion to UTC is

EST: + 5 hours
CST: + 6 hours
MST: + 7 hours
PST: + 8 hours
AST: + 9 hours

Once you go to Daylight Time, you subtract one from the above.  So,
considering that not everybody switches to daylight time, UTC becomes
even more convenient - we all only need to know OUR relationship to the
UTC standard.

So, just to be stubborn, I think I'll continue to make my reservations in
UTC, hoping I don't get kicked off the Access Grid :)  An additional benefit
is that when you fly to England or Portugal, you'll have a much easier
time making these conversions :)

Grazie,

Don

-- 
Don Morton                     http://www.cs.umt.edu/u/morton/  
Department of Computer Science       The University of Montana   
Missoula, MT 59812 | Voice (406) 243-4975 | Fax (406) 243-5139