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- Guardian Unlimited,
- Monday December 3 2007
There's a sinking feeling you get when someone in Tokyo or San Francisco takes ages to answer the phone and - too late - you realise you have just woken them up at 4am. Or worse, you've dialled the number incorrectly and woken a perfect stranger. Fortunately I haven't done either this century thanks to World Clock aka time and date.com. It makes phoning overseas - or phoning home - simple.
London calling
Suppose you want to call someone in Hong Kong, right now. The World Clock page has an alphabetical list of cities (you can search for more) and tells you the current time in each one. From the Hong Kong page, follow the link that says: "See how to dial to Hong Kong," select where you're calling from, and paste in the phone number.
Dialling from London, I paste in the local number of the Foreign Correspondents' Club (2521 1511) to reach an old friend. The site says: "Result, dial: 00 852 2521 1511". This includes the international prefix when dialling out of the UK (00) and the international code for Hong Kong (852). If the result isn't what's expected, for example if there are the wrong number of digits, the site will warn you.
Telephonic faux pas
Hong Kong is 8 hours ahead of London - long enough to cause a potential telephonic faux pas - so I click the link for the World Clock meeting planner. This brings up a column of London and Hong Kong times, listed side by side. Some are marked in red (10pm to 6am), when it would be antisocial to call, some in green (8am to 5pm) and the rest in yellow. This makes it easy to find the time slot when both columns are green and a call will be mutually acceptable. Basically, it tells me I'd best call at 8am-9am in London, when it will be 4pm-5pm in Hong Kong.
Yes, I could work all this out the hard way, but why bother? Also, the meeting planner really comes into its own if you want to set up a conference call for three or four people in different time zones.
You might think time and date.com was created by some giant global corporation, but nothing could be further from the truth. It was started as a hobby by Steffen Thorsen in 1995, when he was studying computing at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. He now has two young children but is still expanding the site.
Moonrises and moonsets
Although I've concentrated on the World Clock, Thorsen has added lots of features, including wind and weather information for the various cities. The site provides calendars for any year, and also has various date calculators. For example you can set up countdowns to specific dates and times, perhaps for a product launch or a child's birthday. You can find sunrises and sunsets, and moonrises and moonsets. You can even calculate the distances between cities and show the route between them on a day-and-night world map.
And if you want answers to questions such as "What day will it be in 100 days?", "When will I be 20,000 days old?" or "How old would Elvis be today?" then time and date.com is definitely the place to go.
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