TimeZones...

... ugh! TimeZones and I just don't mix... never have and never will so I rely heavily on my friends to get me through the challenging moments when I need to work out what's what for whom and when (if you're TimeZone challenged also that statement will make complete sense), now it's mostly my online friends that chip in their brain cells because my "real life" ones run screaming from the room whenever I even attempt to ask for TimeZone help... whimps ...so the burden of responsibility lies with my dear wee online buddies... like KZ who I'd be completely lost without as he's saved many a day for me over the years (it's pretty obvious he's an online friend isn't) in fact it goes right back to the days where he'd email an excel spreadsheet that he had custom made for me detailing the timezones I struggled with (which was kinda all of them really) and goes right up to not that long ago when he helped me work out our WackyB.com forum members timezones so we could meet in chat... dear wee lad that he is and more recently I got a PM from JD who sent me a link to The Fixed Time World Clock which is going to make TimeZone planning for chat, phone conversations etc dead easy.. not that I will ever understand it but The Fixed Time World Clock takes away all need to even try to... it does it all for you no thinking or understanding required!

Now you'd think with KZ close at hand and The Fixed Time World Clock firmly bookmarked I'd be pretty much TimeZone set.. but I'm not.. as per my norm I never will be so you can imagine my excitement (only true TimeZone challenged ppl will be able to understand how "excitement" comes into it ) when I stumbled across FoxClocks which is a super cool extension you can easily use in Thunderbird.... I'm in all over again....

So what does it do (apart from save my precious sanity)?

"FoxClocks displays multiple clocks in the application statusbar, toolbars or menubar for any of hundreds of cities around the world, using a database of time zone and daylight saving information."

let me show you what they mean....

how cool is that! Right in every single new email message that I start is the TimeZones (that I've selected) which makes a dead easy and super quick to know what time it is for the person I'm emailing... perfect for a person like myself. Setting up the countries and cities is not a problem, there are a few methods to access the main FoxClocks window but for me I find double clicking the status bar clocks (as shown above in the orange box) the simplest way as a quick double and up it all pops....

Now you'd think that it can't possibly get any cooler than that.. but it does! (omg I sound like an infomercial ) the next super cool thing about the FoxClocks extension is that you can configure the time and date shown to how you like. Let me just confess at this point that dates confuse the heck out of me also... the internet does my head in when it comes to how ppl format dates and times in different countries e.g the backwards date thing that most have going on where the month comes before the day 3/26/06 which stumps me every time so while FoxClocks comes with lots of "standard" date and time formats to select from I am "unique" in my requirements so fiddle I did....

as with accessing the main window there is a few ways to access the options window, I personally right click on the status bar clocks, select Options and up it pops ready for action.

After a little plonking, which resulted in a huge mess of a format string I soon worked out what did what and how... in fact it's quite simple really... I'm putting my dorkyness down to far too much on my side anyways... my format string turned out as....

<l> <12h>:<m><am> <d-s> <mon-s>

what made life a whole lot simpler (meaning it finally dawned on me ) is that the you can manually edit the format string field.

Example being my first format string was all bunched together like a string of text vomit
<l><12h><m><am><d-s><mon-s>
until I realised that you can edit it yourself, so after selecting to display the Location first, clicking the Add button to the right of it, I then went down to the format string field and put in a space ditto for the : in between the hour and minute and the spaces in between day and the month... doh me

So... the long and short.. if you're TimeZone challenged and run Thunderbird for your email (or FireFox) then check out Fox Clocks at their official home page or grab it from the Mozilla FoxClocks page

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