Those Who Repeat the Past

Those Who Repeat the Past — We sent you back in time, instead of forward in FAQtoids 003. We said that the offset in mail headers from the zone formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is added to local time to get GMT or Universal Time (UT). The correct way to say it is that the offset is added to GMT to get local time. If you get mail that reads "05:00:00 -0700 (PDT)" in one of the headers, it means "add negative 0700 to the current GMT and you’ll get 05:00:00 Pacific Daylight Time." At 5 A.M. PDT, it’s noon GMT; adding negative 7 to noon gets you 5 A.M., the local time when the mail was sent. And don’t get us started about springing forward or falling back. [GF]