[AG-TECH] Bridgeport Room Reservations / Time standards

[Rick Stevens]

Don, this is a very good idea.. UTC would help resolve confusion..

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Don Morton wrote:

> 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
> 
>