Hey Dave, the question of "who sees the New Millennium first" is something my folks were discussing late last night (Something which happens when there's too many of us, in a small room, none of whom can get sloshed because we all have to drive ourselves home afterwards). This is what we decided.

Since we Rinkies pride ourselves on having such a world-wide community presence :-), we ought to determine the time of the First RinkPost by when the New Year comes to the most Eastern-most person we know. That would be... (Drum roll)... Brunnen-G.

Going by local time zones, the first Rinky to experience the New Year on continental North America would be BurgerKing.

[Incidentally, Pacific Time, or PST is the timestamp by which RinkForum posts are dated]


00:00:00 Mon Jan 01 2001 in NEW ZEALAND converts to the following zones:

11:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in Greenwich Mean Time GMT (Zulu Time, in England)

07:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in Canada/Atlantic
06:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in Eastern Standard Time
05:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in Central
04:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in Mountain
03:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in Pacific/Yukon Time
02:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in US/Alaska
01:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in US/Hawaii/Aleutian
00:00:00 Sun Dec 31 2000 in US/Samoa

So if there are any American Samoans reading this post, well, you guys were the last to experience the dying hours of old millennium.

Wolf "with reference to the time zone charts in ye olde telephone book" spirit