Chat Guide Up-Dates

As reported earlier my friends and I have taken over what was called the Lit Guide and has now become the Chat Guide. We are very grateful to Saffy for her generosity in letting us continue this project and because she has kindly agreed to stay on in an advisory capacity. We are also grateful to Jessica, Saffy and numerous others for their hard work and foresight in beginning this project in the first place.

The first subject we have brought up to date in the alphabetically arranged guide is the subject of Time Zones as we’ve heard this sometimes confuses Lady Stetson. We would be grateful for any comments you might have on how this entry may be improved. We anticipate the new guide will be ready in about two months time. Thank you.

TIME ZONES One of the great things about Chat is that you will meet people from all over the world. To make sure you can connect with your friends you will need to learn the basics of time zones. For example if you live in London you will soon realise that your friend in New York is on Eastern Standard Time EST and for most the year will be running five hours behind your time. i.e. if it is 10am in London it is 5am in New York.

For all practical purposes local time is based as on offset on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) more accurately known as UTC*

You also need to be aware that times zones are further complicated by offsets for daylight saving time. For example due to daylight saving time, UTC is the local time at Greenwich only between 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in October and 01:00 UTC on the last Sunday in March. For the rest of the year, local time there is UTC+1, known in the UK as British Summer Time (BST). Similar circumstances apply in many other places. Unfortunately, the offsets are not always applied on the same date so small limited discrepancies can occur so it’s always best to check with your friend.

The definition for time zones can be written in short form as UTC±n where n is the offset in hours. The following examples based on common locations of Chatters, give the local time at various places around the world at 12:00 UTC when daylight saving time is not in effect:



Conversion between time zones obeys the relationship
"time in zone A" − "UTC offset for zone A" = "time in zone B" − "UTC offset for zone B",

If this becomes too much go here: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc
Or here: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

*GMT is defined by the rotation of the Earth, which is not constant in rate. So, the rate of atomic clocks was annually changed to closely match GMT. But in January 1972 it became fixed, using predefined leap seconds instead of rate changes. This new time system is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Please also note that any relationship involving timezones can cause sleep depravation on both sides, so there is often a point where a good night’s sleep may well do you both good. Any decent chatter will accept that this and understand that at some point the need to live real lives and do your jobs/college/study and be alive the next day to chat.