A couple of minutes ago one of the engineers came to me with a bug. Apparently the date parser can't agree about what timezone IST is. On some machines it appears to get Indian Standard Time and on others something like GMT+2:00 which seems likely to be Israeli Standard Time. Mug, Crug and Kublug I say. This whole timezone system is one big nightmare; we should throw out the whole messy business and fix the time problem at its source. From now on 2:00 means the same instant in time anywhere in the world. Wherever you live you'll adapt to the numbers. With that approach when someone in Chicago suggest a meeting at 5:00 with someone in Kathmandu there won't be any strange conversion, the person in Kathmandu will instantly know she's being asked to take a call in the middle of the night. Of course we'll get rid of 12 hour clocks at the same time so people won't mistakenly think that 12:00 AM is noon. We can move to military date ordering so sorting will never be a problem again as well 2005/06/06 23:44:00.0000 will mean the same thing to everyone everywhere and we'll all be happy. Of course we should probably also convert to some more easily manageable system like 10 hour days and 100 minutes per hour, but I'll hold off on that for another day (1440 minutes).

The really great thing about this idea (aside from the possibility of living in a place where it changes from Wednesday to Thursday right in the middle of the day) is that with luck only about half the world will adopt it. That way not only will we have to rewrite every program ever written, but they'll all need to convert back and forth between old-time and new-time. Guaranteed employment for another 50 years (after which 32 bit Unix time will be almost ready to run out and we can start over again).