sweasel.com

So I had to research WBT. Turns out that GMT is another deprecated, politicallt incorrect term — no one should use it as it is scientifically imprecise. AND presumes that Greenwich, England is somehow better than other cities.

We should use “zulu” time or, as the scientists say, Coordinated Universal Time. GMT went out of use in 1968, in the halls of science at least.

But here’s the good part. The ordinary person needed an abbreviation. If not GMT, then what? Englishmen chose CUT, obviously. The French violently objected since that presumed English was better than French (Temps Universel Coordinne or TUC). Negotiations ensued.

The final compromise is UTC. The French celebrated the victory over English “cheek”. Totally out of coincidence, 0 UTC is the same as 0 GMT. But that is mere coincidence, not a nod to Greenwich, England.

I have no clue how to convert WBT to UTC.

You don’t. It *is* UTC.

I’ve stood on the Greenwich Meridian (with a GPS!) and I’ll call it whatevers.

Man – Roger Ebert managed to squeak through the cracks. Now if there every was a dick who deserved a dick…

In Manila, we are +8 GMT. Yes, I am going to stick with GMT. We don’t do daylight savings, which you would think would be nice but it isn’t because everyone else in the US jumps around for daylight savings. So now I have to think “Are they -12 hours or -13 hours from us?”. Pain in the butt. The one ray of sunshine are my friends in Arizona, which told daylight savings to go screw itself a long time ago. I love Arizona.

So, about the Dead Pool – with the current sword rattling in the far east, can we make a call for entire populations? I’m thinking Seoul, South Korean. Something tells me it’s at the top of “Little Boy” Un’s short list.

Whats funny is the French English thing. What is that? The Germans didn’t care or did anyone else. But the French took Greenwich time as a national insult. Its almost like the Monty Python view of Frenchmen.

Soooo, did the GPS reading show it to be zero meridian? Or, is the line in the wrong place. Which would be funny too.

I really like FoxClocks. It puts little real-time clocks in your status bar for Firefox and Chrome. I need to know East and West coast US, plus UK, Oz and NZ and it’s invaluable.

The French have never got over their loss of empire. There’s still a substantial contingent of Frogs who venerate Napoleon, which should be about as acceptable as German Hitler-worshippers. The Napoleonic Wars killed about 4 million people, which is more like 15 million in today’s money.

That’s all right – the French got the length of the metre wrong, too. Half of the survey was screwed up and the guy in charge of the half of it knew it was screwed up. There was a rather fascinating book on that subject a few years back. All completely irrelevant, since it’s an arbitrary distance anyway, but fun.

Oh, Tom, the relationship between the French and English is *very* Monty Python. The French are completely insane, I have come to believe. Their world view is as inimical as possible to the English notion of things (and, for that matter, mine). They use “Anglo Saxon” as an insult — it basically means to work hard and get ahead. And that’s an insult.

Thousands of years of smuggling, looting and pillaging back and forth across the Channel doesn’t help.

To this day, Brits go to France to buy huge quantities of cheap wine and French schoolchildren come to the English tourist towns of the coast and shoplift like little bastards.

Cool pic, Sweas!

Try this converter, something I found (as is so often the case for me) whilst on the way to something else altogether –

Just what the “something else” was that particular time, of course, I disremember – probably nothing of any real consequence (which is also somewhat-frequently the case for me). Handy converter, though – ‘specially if you happen to be located close to Oswego, IL (which is rather uncomfortably-close to Chicago, ILL – but that’s another bucket of slop altogether) – which I am at present, for work-purposes, primarily.

Lessee – that makes the new Dead Pool go-live time…1:00 P.M. Central Daylight Shavings Zone, U.S. of A.

Meanwhiles, as AltB sez, nice pic – the horizontal-stripey jammy-lookin’ pants are an especially nice touch.

(Now, whyizzit, you ‘spose, that portrayal of Fearful Leader brings to mind the Stay-Puft dood from Ghostbusters?…same empty-headed stompin’ around? Oh, well…)

UTC/zulu/GMT is how airlines don’t screw up their schedules when they fly across time zones. They tell you that your flight departs at 0845Z, and it’s up to you to do the math and get there at the correct local time. It eliminates all the “Is that Eastern time or Pacific time?” crap. Although it worked less well for me in Asia, when I was never really clear on what day it was, never mind what time.

By the bye – I neglected to mention: That converter I linked to has a handy little box wherein you can enter whatever location you wish (within reason; I don’t think it will work for other planets, nor quite possibly for anywhere in the “alternate world” inhabited by “Progressives” or Demonrats – excuse the repeat, there), which will thereby add that locale to the converter.

Please enjoy – the Intartoobs is/are truly marvelous, yes?…

I was just reading an article that claims Chinese people on the internet call Kim Jong Un “Fatty the Third.”

I had a yuuge argument with a guy at work over GMT once (I refuse to call it UTC). We were setting up a pre-shipment acceptance test for some hardware that was going to be used by people who are on GMT, so I said that we should set the internal clock to GMT. He said no, we should set it to local time, which is Central time. I said that didn’t make any sense because our users were on GMT, and I was 100% positive they would want the camcorder’s clock set to GMT. He responded with a long email explaining what time zones were (his explanation was c&p’d from wikipedia) and why our users use UTC (they are not actually in any time zone at all) and how we don’t need to and besides our quality assurance guys don’t understand time zones and will be very confused if we set the internal clock to something other than local time. (I knew the QA who would be monitoring that work; he didn’t. Trust me, it was not a problem.)

So, finally, Argumentative Guy told me to put in the procedure, “Set the time to Central Standard Time (local [city] time).” So I asked him, do you want CST, which is GMT-6, or local time, which was presently GMT-5 since we were in Daylight Savings? He didn’t understand what I was asking. Maybe I should have explained time zones to him.

Anyway, we later sent the procedure for a user representative, who was on Earth with the rest of us, to review. First thing he said? Set the time to UTC. HA. Who was right? That’s right, bitches – ME.

hm. I was gonna guesstimate noon for Central time, but JS has a fancy calculator, sooo…

“Fatty the Third.” I like that. I’ve been calling him the Little Hand Grenade with a Bad Haircut (first used by Peggy Noonan referring to Ross Perot). Apparently Fatty the Third does not trust barbers, and cuts his own hair.

So, Swease, when did you join Anonymous? Artwork looks a bit like yours. Heh.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304167/Kim-Jong-Un-pig-picture-Hackers-control-North-Koreas-official-Twitter-Flickr-accounts.html

Heh. You don’t even need Photoshop to do a good Kim Jong Un parody, Mike. The little butterball is *so* photogenic.

Many thanks for the link, Mike – for once, Anonymous is actually up to something useful, if only to provide idle amusement. I like the “Wanted” poster concept – who knows? – maybe somebody will take the hint and try to collect the “reward”.

The Mickey Mouse belly-tattoo is an especially nice touch, with “Surprised Mickey”‘s o-shaped mouth supplied by Fatty The Third’s belly button cavity. Cute…

The most interesting thing I’ve read about all this is that each and every propaganda video had one major Freudian slip contained in them. Every target in his BURN AMERICA videos is the U.S. headquarters of a major South Korean Multinational. It seems he’s more angry that South Korea isn’t sharing their success with him than they are at us for backing the South Korean government.

NK submarines off US west coast with ballistic missiles awaiting orders to launch before lunch.
Remember those old Golf subs sold to NK in the 1990’s? They came with missiles.
Pesky old hydrazine nasties – but being Soviet, they work.

Apparently your Navy is vigorously looking for them, but can’t find them!

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