Newsletter December 2010
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December 2010 | |
The World Clock App for iPhoneThe timeanddate.com World Clock has been a reliable and accurate source of time for many years and is now available on the Apple iPhone. The World Clock-Time Zones App for iPhone gives users the convenience of finding the correct local time for any city around the world, even if your device clock is wrong. The app features a large list of cities worldwide with relevant time zone information for each city. iPhone users can customize the app by selecting from a variety of analog clock designs, as well as different clock displays - digital, analog, or text clocks. The World Clock-Time Zones app is fully aware of the constant effects of time zone and daylight saving time (DST) changes and will adjust times based on the databases from timeanddate.com. Learn more about how-to-use the World Clock-Time Zones app or download it directly from iTunes. Countdown to the 2011 New Year!The 2011 New Year is fast approaching and there's no easier or accurate way to countdown to the New Year than by using the countdowns available from timeanddate.com. iPhone users can countdown to the New Year from any location with the use of the Exact Countdown 2011 app for iPhone. Don't have an iPhone? Simply use the timeanddate.com Countdown on our website to easily countdown to the 2011 New Year for any time zone. You can also find out who will enter the New Year 2011 first, as well as view the countdown to the 2011 New Year in all time zones. Special Birthdays App for FacebookThe timeanddate.com Special Birthdays is our newest application for Facebook users. Who says that your birthday only happens once a year? Now users can find out and share with Facebook friends a different way to celebrate their birthday based on weeks, days, hours, minutes, and even seconds! Now you can even make yourself feel older or younger by discovering your age in planet years. Find out when you will be 15 Mars years old or 50 Venus years old and share your special birthday with your Facebook friends. Monthly PollDecember Poll If you are having troubles with the vote function below, you can also vote online. Previous Poll ResultsYou can view the previous poll results online for last month's poll question “How do you normally check the time during the day?”. All the Time in the Worldby Allan EastmanThe Varieties of Temporal Experience Allan Eastman left behind his successful career as a Film and Television Director and Executive Producer to travel the world. He has visited over 100 countries on all six continents. He spends most of his time reading, writing and thinking about things. He is an amateur historian, a music archivist, a reasonable chef and a seeker after happiness . Hanging In The Time Bubble The moment when I truly began to suspect that Time didn’t really exist at all was when I was hanging suspended in midair, bare as a baby - everything frozen in suspended animation – about to suffer the worst fall of my life. Sixteen solar orbits ago my beloved Ex, my daughter and I had flown down to Jamaica for a few weeks to escape the deep freeze of a particularly cruel Canadian Winter. We had rented a beach house in a funky little town called Runaway Bay from a Jamaican Doctor living in Toronto. It was great - a white 2 story stone home in the middle of the long crescent of the bay - with a private freshwater pool on a terrace overlooking the golden beach and azure waters of the Caribbean. My daughter, Sybil had just turned 8 and like any kid that age, she was capable of staying in the pool from breakfast until dinner. We had to force her to come out from time to time only when her extremities started to turn blue. She would stand there shivering in the hot Jamaican sun saying, “I’m not cold, Daddy.” Then, she had the habit of finding every dry towel in the house and wrapping herself up in them until she was warm enough to return to the water. The vacation was going great – lots of sun, plenty of Jerk Chicken, fine reggae music on IRIE-FM, the fragrant tropical air caressing your skin as you took the time to read a book or have a little snooze in the hammock under the beach umbrella. Perfect. I used to like to go for a long snorkel every morning on the ridges of coral reef out in the bay. There was a cornucopia of colorful marine life and even the wreckage of a large Banana Boat broken up on the reef during a hurricane a few years back to explore. Occasionally, I would even spear a crab to bring home for the stew pot. This particular morning, I had returned from a prolonged dive and had gone up to the bathroom on the 2nd floor by the master bedroom for a long, hot shower to warm up and to sluice the salt off. When I stepped out of the shower, the towel rack was empty. I looked out the window at the pool. Yes, Sybil had 7 or 8 towels stockpiled there to wrap up in. I started to hurry down to steal one back from her. The stairs were made of polished white stone, 8 or 9 steps down to a small landing, a left turn and then, another 8 or 9. I was moving quickly. On the first step down, my foot – still wet from the shower – skidded away like I had slipped on a cartoon banana peel, my body launched forward and rotated through 90 degrees and I was instantly up in the air a meter or more above the sharp edged steps. And Time stopped. I hung up there for the longest period. There was a curious peacefulness to it, everything frozen and quiet and calm. My first conscious thought was “This is going to be really bad!” I visualized my spine cracking against the edge of one of the steps or even worse, the back of my skull. I wondered about anything I could do to help myself in this situation and realized that there was nothing. I convinced myself to relax my body as much as possible but tried to hunch my head up and away from danger. This all seemed to take a long time – some minutes anyway - but nothing else had changed. I was still hanging in exactly the same spot in mid air. In some strange way I started to really enjoy the experience. How extraordinary this Time Stop was. I had been in a bad car crash a few decades before and had had a similar experience of Time Dilation but had been knocked unconscious by the collision so I was never really sure whether it had been real or a dream. This, on the other hand, was definitely very real. I wasn’t moving at all in Space or Time. The sunlight illuminating the smooth white stone of the staircase wall was truly beautiful. I could see every bead of water on my skin refracting light through them like an Escher engraving. Out the window in front of me, the palm fronds were frozen in the breeze and a huge white gull hung motionless in the cloudless sapphire sky. I remember thinking, “This is really cool!” Then, Time unlocked. Read more of Allan Eastman’s article The Varieties of Temporal Experience, found at our guest feature section All the Time in the World. | Message from the TeamWelcome to the December Newsletter! Last month we celebrated the 15th anniversary of the World Clock and introduced our newest iPhone application the Intl Meeting Planner. This month we have been very busy developing our newest application for Facebook, the Special Birthdays App, and our new World Clock app for iPhone. We also updated the World Clock so users can easily customize their display options. Visit our Facebook page to get the latest updates from timeanddate.com and discuss issues related to our website. We’re on Twitter too! We hope to make more upgrades and offer new services on our site in the future, so keep in touch with our website to help you with all of the time and date related information. It is important to us that we make all of our services work to suit your needs. Email your suggestions for mobile apps, search tools, and other ideas to: webmaster@timeanddate.com. If you have missed previous editions, you can find them on our online newsletter archive. Subscribe to automatically receive our newsletter each month and don’t forget to confirm your subscription. The Team at timeanddate.com FAQ/Tip of the MonthThe timeanddate.com World Clock has been updated to include a pop-up window where users can easily change their settings to display different options. Now you can customize the World Clock to display the name display, the time zone abbreviation, the time format (AM/PM or 24-hour), daylight saving time (DST), the amount of columns and the time with updating seconds. Simply click on the "Change Settings" button located at the top of the World Clock list. A pop-up window will automatically appear where you can select all of the different display options for the World Clock. After you have selected your preferred display options, your settings for the World Clock will be saved for future visits. Learn more about the World Clock and how it can be customized to suit your needs. Did You Know...…The December Solstice occurs at 23:38 (11:38pm) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on December 21. The December solstice is also known as the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. It occurs when the sun reaches its most southerly declination of -23.5 degrees and marks the least hours of daylight for those living north of the Tropic of Cancer and the longest day of the year for those living south of the Tropic of Cancer. Find out when the sun will rise and set in your location with the use of the Sunrise Calculator. timeanddate.com on Twitter“djackmanson @kweenie http://timeanddate.com has a calculator that works out exactly such questions” “PuffaPuffa World Travelers & Expat Workers–Be in the Know with Timeanddate.com” “tigrs99 @jeanie_ann Oh AZ dont have one i normally chk my iphone clock it is linked to timeanddate.com” “mikekuniavsky Crap, just missed a call because I did my International Calling Math wrong. Should have just looked at timeanddate.com.” “Alice_600 www.timeanddate.com/ this is an awesome calculator of time.” “onosraye Omg! Its making me paranoid.....I just checked timeanddate.com for the time cos I dnt trust my phones'...cc @OnyiBi” “bob_aber @timeanddate I allways used your website and now I have your app!” Have your thoughts about timeanddate.com heard on Twitter. Twitter users can also follow timeanddate.com’s latest tweets. Time Zone NewsThousands Protest Time Zone Changes in Russia Thousands gathered in eastern Russia to protest against the proposed changes to the country’s time zones on December 11, 2010. Daylight Saving Bill Gets Initial Vote in UK The Daylight Saving Bill 2010-11 is a Private Member's Bill that received its Second Reading in the House of Commons on December 3, 2010. Time Zone Change is Possible in Acre, Brazil The time zone of Acre might return to its old time zone, which is five hours behind Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) based on a referendum presented during this year’s election in Brazil. About timeanddate.comtimeanddate.com is an established company that first came online in 1998. We maintain more than a decade of experience in providing a thorough, accurate and reliable source of time and date related information. Our website features applications and services such as the World Clock and the Calendar. These are just two of many useful tools to help people get all their time and date related information. Visit our website to find out more information about the company behind timeanddate.com. |
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