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It is more than likely that an HP 3000 would e found in Newfoundland, Canada.
That timezone spec is on the half hour.
There is an old joke in Canada that given an audience of Canadians and
Americans, you can easily find out who is Canadian by simply saying something
like "The world will come to an end at 12:00 Noon today, 12:30 in
Newfoundland." Those who laugh are Canadians. :)
Tome zones that are on the half hour include: Tehran, Kabul, Bombay, Calcutta,
New Delhi, Adelaide and Darwin.
I believe there are also timezones which are 15 minutes, somewhere in the South
Pacific.
There is a nice, albeit incomplete, picture at
www.1horoscope.com/timezone_help.html
It also describes Daylight Savings Time, which reminds me of an incident a few
weeks ago. In the US, post offices have a clock running backwards, counting
the number of days, hours, minutes, seconds and hundreds of seconds until the
year 2000. This is part of their campaign to sell stamps that depict various
events or people of the century. Anyways, I was standing in line when the
person in front of me loudly proclaimed that the clock was off by one hour.
Indeed, if one took the current time and added the number of hours shown on
the clock, it came out to one hour past midnight. Everyone guffawed the post
office could not get their time straight, until I pointed out that we still had
to "fall back" an hour in a few weeks, at which point the clock would be
correct. I can't believe I defended the USPS, after they misspelled Harry
Truman's name on the 20 cent stamp. They are showing it as "Harry S. Truman".
Unbelievable! I even wrote to the post office to point out their error. They
just said thank you.
Kind regards,
Denys. . .
Denys Beauchemin
HICOMP
(800) 323-8863 (281) 288-7438 Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys at hicomp.com www.hicomp.com
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask]
[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, 19 October, 1999 4:02 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: OT: Timezone trivia
Hello Listers,
With the upcoming change back to standard time for many of us, I thought
my fellow listers might be amused by this.
Several days ago, while planning a trip to New Zealand for the winter, I
happened upon a Y2K sunrise website.
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/faq/docs/first_sunrise.html
I found what I thought to be an obvious error. Look at the answer to
question number 5 and notice that the last sentence reads, "The Sun will
rise there at 16:04 (12/31) UT or 4:49 AM local time." Naturally, I
assumed this was a mistake; 16:04 UT cannot be 4:49 AM local time
anywhere. I wrote to the site's contact email address to politely point
out the typo.
Here is their reply.
>
>
>From: "James L. Hilton" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: Robert Peterson <[log in to unmask]>
>Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 09:52:05 -0400
>Subject: Re: An apparent website typo
>
>
>
>Dear Mr. Peterson,
>
>Actually the times are correct. The Chatham Islands are one of a rare
>group of places where the local time does not differ by an integer
>number of hours from UT (Universal Time also known as Greenwich Time).
>In the case of the Chatham Islands they are 12:45 ahead of UT.
>
> Astronomical Applications Dept.
> U.S. Naval Observatory
> http://aa.usno.navy.mil/AA/
>
>
Now, it's unlikely that an HP3000 would be found in the Chatham Islands.
But it's comforting to know that the TIMEZONE spec of the SETCLOCK
command could handle local time accurately if need be.
:)
Bob
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