A Little Bit Of Nothing Important

A friend sent me this bit of insight...

On Wednesday, at two minutes and three seconds after 1
in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03
04/05/06, which in the US means April 5th. That won't
ever happen again, at least in our lifetime.

Those of you in the UK or other countries that insist
on using day/month/year format dates have to wait
until the 4th of May.

We now resume normal programming.

Somebody already mentioned that it will happen twice that day- again at 1:02 in the afternoon. A rebuttal to that was already offered- it's actually 13:02. I maintain that since most don't use a 24 hour clock both positions are correct.

Dennis

Got that today, too. I must wonder though, what my day is.

I live in the USA, which uses the MM/DD/YY system - the system that makes Wednesday "special". But I use the far superior (much easier to use for short-term organisation - if you're organising long-term, then the YYYY-MM-DD system is best) DD/MM/YY system.

So...do I "celebrate" on Wednesday? Or next month? Or both?

Such a quandry...

My brain must not operate properly- please explain why DD/MM/YY is far superior to MM/DD/YY. Also why is YYYY-MM-DD better for long term?

Dennis

Hey HCS,

You're taking the concept of a little bit of nothing just a bit too far- there's nothing new in either of those posts.

Dennis

I was going to post this and saw you beat me to it, Dennis. Interesting bit of trivia, isn't it?

What's going on, Hilari? If your posts are errors, just hit edit and delete them. As Bob M. would say, inquiring minds want to know.

Here's my opinion of why.

When you're looking for things short-term, I tend to look for them within the last month or so. In that month, each date only occured once. With the DD/MM/YYYY method, you only need to look for the date in your papers or filename or whatever, and don't have to dig past the months - most of which could be the same, or in the case of spelled out words, varying lengths - to find the specific date.

With long-term, YYYY-MM-DD is best, especially when using a computer. Example: I bring my laptop to school, and use a filing system like this to classify my notes and stuff. Today's Latin notes are 2006-4-3 LAT notes. I can easily go into my Word documents and immediately see all my notes organised by date. It makes life much easier when we have to refer back to old notes - all I have to do is know when we learned the subject (or use clues in other filenames like "industrialrevstudyguide" to get an idea) and immedately open all the notes from a unit.

So for me, it's grown from my Anglophilic quirk to a real logic thing. Kind of like how my spelling words in the international way has grown from Anglophility to a protest against what is basically a language created by Webster to be different from the British in the 19th Century.

Hi, my name is Greg, and I think about things way too much.

Well, Greg you explained why it works for you but unfortunately you didn't explain why it is far superior.

It seems to be a matter of taste and opinion, not fact.

Sorta why they have chocolate and vanilla ice cream- different strokes for different folks.

Dennis

Dennis,

The yyyymmdd format is used heavily in things related to communications especially. Used it for 20 years in my former life. It allows the quickest sorting by date of any system because it is the logical progression. There are no hyphens or other punctuation used, and it is always 8 digits long. Sometimes you will see a time stamp attached (sererated by a space), usually in Zulu time.

If you think about how a computer sorts numbers, 20060403 comes before 20060404 and after 20060402. Anything that uses computer logs really benefits from a system such as this.

However, the common use of date indicator in the US is mmddyyyy, often seperated by a hyphen or a slash, sometimes a period. I think the tidbit you shared is interesting. Are you going to stay up to observe the happenin - thanks. Are you going to stay up to observe the happening and report for us?

Those that use the non-US format while in the US tend to screw things up on a fairly large scale. I have a birthday that is a single digit day in a single digit month. Those that do not adhere to the standard methodology move my birthdate by 3 months and can cause issues because all of a sudden data in one system does not agree with data in another.

Dave,

My brain doesn't work in a logical way- hence the "better" method escapes me since I'm engrained with the other one.

I see the logic to it- just don't use it.

And no I won't be staying up to experience the phenomenon. I need my beauty sleep- I have to be at work at 8 AM on Wed.

Dennis

Well, I'll be up as usual. I think it's verrry interesting that ours is the only country that doesn't do like the rest of the world in so many matters. The metric system is another example.

Grace,

That's just the American Way. We as a people feel we're entitled to do things our own way and the rest of the World can either follow or example or continue to be backward.

Dennis

Excuse me - I take ofense to being called backward! Your atitude is typical - think you know it all and are better than the rest of us.
Sorry I don't agree!
HCS

Sorry Grace, not used to using the forum yet and don't quit know how it all works. Will try to do better next time! Guess I was also in a bit of a hurry.
HCS

Hilary,

Did you not see the emoticon at the end of my statement. I was making a statement of opinion- not one I hold but one that is prevelant with many americnas (and catually of many other countries as well- we all tend to think we are the best and the rest are wrong at times)

For the record I don't disagree with you- I was pointing out a fault with the American Psyche not with the rest of the world.

Please reread my post with that in mind and you will surely not be offended.

Dennis

Dating the European way can cause havoc when done here in the States when manually filing items chronologicly. Used to beat on the exchange students working for one of my clients to get them to date their paperwork as mm/dd/yr so I would file it correctly. Gave me the same migraine as having a lefty go into the files--any folders used were replaced in the files backwards.

Sandy

I figured out the confusion resulting from spelling out a date from 1-12 in the DDMMYYYY format early (i.e. today, 4 April 2006, comes out as - okay, that doesn't work. But you know what I mean.)

So I just spell out the month, either as 4 April 2006 or 4 Apr 2006. If I'm in a situation where the (to me) inferior format MUST be used, I'm not that steadfast.

I used to work as a computer programmer, and have been using the "logical" way to date files for quite some time. Unfortunately, I work with a bunch of accounts now who organize their files in folders with the month name. So currently we have "APR - FEB - JAN - MAR". This drives me crazy. I know Micro$oft can make their operating system recognize these names and put them in the chronological order. I sometimes wonder if the people at Micro$oft even use their own software.

(Seems we might be running a parallel thread on the same topic ... posted this there ... in case its missed, thought I would post it here as well)

I mentioned this to my son and he emailed me back that his roommate said we all missed this time and date ...

==== 12:34:56 7/8/'90 ====

... then again, maybe we didnt miss it but just had no place back then to share it !!!

Sorry, Dennis...I didn't see your post before I put one up...I too received this info in an email from a friend. I do find it interesting.

Hilari, it's amazing what these guys have done with this site - all kinds of good tools for editing and embellishing our msgs. I haven't gotten the hang of it all yet, but it is fun to experiment. I should have used a "graemlin" with my post - looking at it in bold print, it sounds a little abrasive. Sorry, didn't mean to sound that way.

Dennis, I sure know what you mean!

Another good one was 01:01:01 01/01/01 and all the subsequent such combinations. This year we'll have 06:06:06 06/06/06.