Often times I find myself in a need of converting time and date from the US time zones to my local ones. Today I was trying to figure out the net broadcast times for the E3 conferences. The schedule for the first one read Mon 6/14 10:30am PST and I was way too lazy to calculate the time offset for all six events manually.

There are a whole bunch of sites that deal with time conversion, but they are either painfully ugly to look at or week on functionality. Google, as of yet, does not do any time conversions. I decided to try Wolfram|Alpha – the awesome “scientist in a box” from the authors of Mathematica. The result it returned was nothing short of perfect.


Sample result by Wolfram|Alpha

 

Not only has Wolfram|Alpha recognize the string – it also figured out my current location using GeoIP and provided me with local time of the event. It also told me what is my time offset from Los Angeles (-10 hours) and how much time is left until the event. Purely awesome. It made scheduling my meetings around the web conferences a breeze.

If you need to convert time in the zones other than the one you are currently in, you can always use the following syntax: convert 10:30am PST to CET. It will give you all the info you need, but does not currently support dates.

So that does it for a QubaHQ tutorial of the week… just kidding. I will be most likely recording a new AE tutorial tomorrow.

You can use Wolfram|Alpha by going to the following address:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/