Scheduled Maintenance Mar 18th

[Miss Betsy]

There will be a maintenance window today, Thursday, March 13th [changed in a later post to Tuesday, March 18th - presumably at the same time], at 14:00 -0700* affecting the SpamCop reporting system. The email system is not affected by this maintenance.

We anticipate this maintenance will last less than 2 hours.

When the maintenance completes you may notice some system slowness as we

process through the accumulated spam. Thank you for your patience.

Ellen

SpamCop

f/u's to SpamCop

Please propagate as needed.

*[this is the convention for showing time as it relates to GMT. it will happen at 1400 hrs where the local offset is -0700 hrs from the GMT. I always get confused about adding or subtracting your offset from GMT to find your local time so I won't offer any more advice! Miss Betsy]

[Farelf]

...*[this is the convention for showing time as it relates to GMT. it will happen at 1400 hrs where the local offset is -0700 hrs from the GMT. I always get confused about adding or subtracting your offset from GMT to find your local time so I won't offer any more advice! Miss Betsy]

Well, I will.

-0700 means 7 hours behind GMT/UTC (near enough¹) or 181400T to incorporate the day number and the mil timezone (as one might when wishing to minimize the risk of misunderstanding).

So, 14:00 + 07:00 = 21:00 +0000 (GMT/UTC - or 182100Z)

I am currently in TZ "H" with DST = +0900 (08:00 + 01:00)

So 21:00 + 09:00 becomes 30:00 = 1 day + 06:00 = 06:00 Wednesday 19 March (190500H + 0100) - see why the day number is useful.

So:

Perth 190500H + 0100

Darwin 190630IK

Adelaide 190630IK + 0100

Brisbane 190700K

Hobart 190700K + nobody (except, hopefully, Taswegians) knows

Sydney & Melbourne = 190700K + 0100

¹There is a technical difference between the terms IIRC but nothing to distress common usage.

[Miss Betsy]

That explains how you find the GMT and then find your local time (and date).

There is a shortcut where you add/subtract your local offset to the local offset stated to find the local time. If you 'think' in terms of local time plus the offset, then manipulating the offset works (if my local offset is -0500, then I know that 1400 -0700 is 1200 -0500 - I subtract the offsets and subtract the hours. For Farelf, apparently he would add the offsets and add the hours).

For most of us, it is much more sensible to figure out what GMT is from the announced time and then figure out local time using the local offset which is what Farelf did. Which is what started the discussion in the first place since it seemed to some that Ellen should announce the time as 2100 0000 GMT instead of giving local time and the local offset which is a slightly more understandable way than saying 2 pm PDT or 6 am TZH since few know the names of the time zones more than three or four away and more people know about GMT and local offsets - especially those who can read headers. But apparently those who work with headers daily, prefer to state their local time and the GMT offset rather than stating GMT time and everyone is used to converting offsets)

Miss Betsy