Does Anybody Know What Time It Is? (Does anyone care?)
Speaking of dates, I've decided to switch to ISO-8601 compliant notation. I think there is too much chance for mis-communications when using numbers to represent dates. For example, in the US, 05/12/04 represents May 12, 2004. But in most other countries, it would mean 5 December 2004. Under ISO-8601, I think both are wrong as it should be read as 4 December 2005.
This means when I use numbers (as opposed to spelling out the month which, as I understand it, ISO-8601 is silent on since there is no ambiguity when you spell out the month) to designate a date, it will be in the general form of YYYY-MM-DD. In addition, time will be expressed using the 24-hour clock with the offset to Universal Coordinated Time displayed after the local time. For example, 23:30-10:00 would be displayed instead of 11:30 p.m. Hawaiian Standard Time.
Since I very rarely, on this blog, type out dates using only numbers, there shouldn't be much of a change. On the other hand, I do refer to the time, from time to time. But I assume most people will understand what time it is.
As an interesting sidebar, those wacky ISO people apparently created two different designations for midnight. From what I understand, you can say 2004-08-31T24:00-10:00 or you can say 2004-09-01T00:00-10:00. Don't ask me why because it seems to create an ambiguity, something I thought they were trying to get rid of (in addition, no digital clock I know reads 24:00 at midnight). In any case, I'll just say midnight rather than use numbers.
Aloha!