bbs.spamgourmet.com

Posted: **Sat Mar 10, 2007 12:46 am**

In honor and anticipation of the unusual timezone switch in the USA that happens tomorrow (or is it the next day?), we've decided to do something that we should have done long ago - shift the server time to UTC and start expressing date/times that way on the website. This switch was done at 00:39 UTC on March 10 (which was 4:39PM PST right before that). We have *not* gone through and adjusted existing database records to reflect the shift, so records before this time might be 8 hours off. Not sure. Since we were looking at the possibility of weirdness anyway, we figured this would be a good time to take the UTC plunge. If this causes an issue for you, contact us, and we can prolly help.

Posted: **Sat Mar 10, 2007 12:54 am**

Actually, it looks like the existing data is showing up properly.

Posted: **Thu Mar 15, 2007 11:50 am**

What did you have until now? PST ( UTC - 8 )? So now it's just UTC itself, which is also GMT (aside for a fractional difference), right?

Posted: **Sun Mar 18, 2007 10:49 pm**

It was PST/PDT, (-8 or -7) depending on what time of year it is. Now it's UTC, which is pretty much the same as GMT, except that GMT is normally paired with BST (British Summer Time, I think), since they use daylight savings time, too.

Posted: **Mon Mar 19, 2007 6:25 pm**

Then what is UTC paired with? Or does it always remain constant?

Posted: **Mon Mar 19, 2007 7:00 pm**

For all practical purposes, GMT=UTC unless you are dealing with the definition of the second and fine-grained time references where I think their might be some subtleties.

But for things like time zones, GMT and UTC are the same.