Celebration Time

This is from a slightly strange engineering mailing list I belong to at work...


>Subject: Observances

>From a slightly bizarre friend of mine at MIT...

>Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 19:00:30 -0400 (EDT)
>
>I'm having a gaming run this Saturday at my mother's house in
>Arlington. But there's something I'd like to celebrate that evening,
>so I'm scheduling a game break with refreshments for others who may
>want to join us.
>
>What is there to celebrate?
>
>You certainly heard all the hoopla over Y2K, and maybe even went to a
>Y2K party. Well, Unix time is measured in seconds since the epoch,
>where the Unix epoch is the beginning of 1970. The number of digits
>in Unix time increases by one when the count reaches one billion (as
>defined in American English) and Unix time goes from 999999999 to
>1000000000. That's 40 seconds after 9:46pm EDT this Saturday:
>
>$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1000000000, "n"'
> Sat Sep 8 21:46:40 2001



... for you west coasters, that's
$perl -e 'print scalar localtime 1000000000, "n"'
Sat Sep 8 18:46:40 2001