Don, I will post your dates tomorrow with your UTC time and a transitional note of (i.e. 27 March 8pm - 28 March 3pm (am I even close here)) I hoped to deal with UTC when the software for an AG calendar was in place. I will work with AG techs here at ANL to get this in place on our current schedule/website. Mary Fritsch At 06:29 PM 3/20/2001 -0800, Don Morton wrote:

Hello, may I please reserve the Bridgeport Room for 2100-0200 UTC on the following Wednesdays:

28 March, 4 April, 11 April, 18 April, 2 May, 9 May, 30 May.

This will be used by Arctic Region Supercomputing Centre and U. Montana Missoula (and others) for SC Global, AGN courses, etc. planning meetings.

At this time, I'd like to make the humble recommendation that we start using UTC (also known as GMT or Zulu) as a common time reference for AGN activities. As a non-Easterner who deals with Alaska collaborators, I've found it quite confusing to figure out when rooms are available, having to convert between Eastern or Central time, Mountain time, and Alaska time. My guess is that once there are active international sites, this will become impossible (or, at the very least, quite error-prone).

With a common UTC standard, everybody only needs to understand THEIR relation to the standard. For those of you in North America, if you're on Standard time, the conversion to UTC is

EST: + 5 hours CST: + 6 hours MST: + 7 hours PST: + 8 hours AST: + 9 hours

Once you go to Daylight Time, you subtract one from the above. So, considering that not everybody switches to daylight time, UTC becomes even more convenient - we all only need to know OUR relationship to the UTC standard.

So, just to be stubborn, I think I'll continue to make my reservations in UTC, hoping I don't get kicked off the Access Grid :) An additional benefit is that when you fly to England or Portugal, you'll have a much easier time making these conversions :)

Grazie,

Don

-- Don Morton http://www.cs.umt.edu/u/morton/ Department of Computer Science The University of Montana Missoula, MT 59812 | Voice (406) 243-4975 | Fax (406) 243-5139