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Dealing with SL Time

Given that we recently had a change in the last digit of our time clocks (a sly way of saying, “Happy New Year”), we thought it worth sharing how we deal with events and time zones in Second Life. The ability to meet anyone from any RL location, means that timing is critical.

In this tip, we’ll review the “proper” notation for times in Second Life, and provide some tools you can use to set up easily clickable time zone converters, to help people from around the world show up to your event… on time!

Until a few months ago, the world of Second Life had its “own” time zone; events in world were scheduled in the SLT time zone (“Second Life Time”), which was equivalent to US Pacific Time, since Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, are headquartered in San Francisco. It was rather nicely to give time in a quirky time zone code, but we guess it confused more people that was worthwhile.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
sl-time-login.jpg

Therefore, all times you see on your SL screens, and on the SL web site, are now in Pacific Time (see “What Does SLT Mean?”):

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
sl-time.jpg

You may still likely see references to things taking place at some time “SLT”, so just remember to transpose that to “PST”. But while this is nice for those of us in the US, where we can usually easily do some clock arithmetic in out heads to convert Pacific time to local, it’s a bit more of a challenge across the waters.

So let’s say I was planning an SL event for tomorrow, January 3, 2007, at 6:00 PM PST. There are two useful sites you can use to generate links that provide worldwide listings of local times converted from “California/Linden Lab” time.

The Fixed Time World Clock provides a web form where we can enter the “fixed” time, 6:00 PM, Janaury 3 in San Francisco, California’s time zone

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
fixed-time-clock.jpg

and it generates the web page with the equivalent times around the world, as a URL you can share:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?
month=1&day=3&year=2007&hour=18&min=0&sec=0&p1=224

That’s a pretty hefty, long URl, but we’ll deal with that later. The same site has a useful tool for creating a Personal Time Clock, so if you live in say, Paris, you can create a bookmarkable link that shows your local time, as well as the time in San Francisco (to compare for SL event times), and maybe another setting for your sister in Tokyo, and crazy Uncle Ernie in Melbourne.

Another site, the World Time Server, has similar tools, plus code you can embed into web sites to create special clock/date displays. For the same event, we can go to the Event Time Converter, and use the menu on the right side to indicate the event we are wanting to set up is in California, US time. We set the time:

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Clik here to view.
world-time-server.jpg

and this site as well generates a link we can share with others that offers a way to map that time to any local time around the world:

http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_US-CA.aspx?
y=2007&mo=1&d=3&h=18&mn=0

So if you are sharing event details, these links make it easy for anyone to show up at the correct time!

Lastly, you can run thise long ugly URLs through a service like TinyURL. rendering the two examples above as the much more brief:

So that’s the way to deal with time(s)!


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