This week a relatively new SL’er asked me what time a concert was in her time zone crediting with me with mental telepathy as I had no idea where she was in RL and also more math ability than I have to be able to convert from Second Life time to any time zone on the planet.
Later in the same weekend I received an IM from someone who I had patiently talked through time conversion with the prior week, only to have her arrive 5 hours late for the concert, not realize her mistake and message me, “I thought there was a harp concert now”.
Sigh.
It may be that I have been in SL too long as I am getting a bit irritable about people who will not take responsibility for figuring out how their local time relates to Second Life time or who pout and wish that the rest of the world would accommodate to THEIR time.
We live in an international world within Second Life, and at any Music Island concert, we can expect to have people from many of the world’s time zones represented. They all manage to get there at the same time because they have figured out how their local time relates to SLT (adding or subtracting the time difference) or they use a time converter or world clock widget to keep them on track.
Anyone who has had to read international flight schedules, plan an international conference call, or figure out when to call a relative in another time zone has had to do this as a routine order of business.
What is SECOND LIFE TIME?
It is Pacific Time and it is located in the upper right hand corner of your SL viewer window.
Why is it called SLT? It says PST.
Once upon a time it used to be called and labelled SLT and it has stuck.
Why are notices time-stamped with GMT if the world runs on SLT?
I have NO IDEA. Personally I wish that Linden Labs would either stop time-stamping notices totally or do two things, time stamp them in SLT and put the time stamp at the bottom of the notice well away from the time of the event and clearly labelled as a “sent” time. Currently when a notice goes out the reader sees one time listed for the event and a totally different time right underneath (the time-stamp). It is VERY confusing, but we have to learn to cope until if and when this is fixed.
How can I check SLT when I am not inworld?
Get yourself a handy-dandy desktop world clock from: http://www.timeanddate.com
I hope this helps. In the meantime I have set up two world clocks on Music Island so that I hope when people appear hours after the concert, they are able to review the time and make adjustments for the future.