Yeah, sure I am a frequent world traveler, but I am a complete moron when it comes to figuring out what time it is where ever I am about to go. Tomorrow I go to London and thats easy because its one hour behind Amsterdam. But in a few weeks I go to Singapore, then Melbourne, then Sydney, then Dubai in a single trip. While I can look up the timezones in the Windows Time dialog, its too easy to change my time zone right then. Right now to help me along I use three tools, and none are really easy to configure. The first is on my desktop. I use Samurize and have a config that shows me time in Seattle, Miami, Amsterdam, Singapore, and Sydney, along with current CPU utilization, ip addresses, and disk space.

I split it across four pieces so it would fit on one screen. Another tool I use is a simple web page that shows the same time zones that I can access on my blackberry. The third tool is my Seiko Sporturaworld time watch which shows me two time zones at a time. These do an adequate job of showing time zones so I don’t call someone at 4am though they take a bit of time to use. The Samurize and web page configs are tough to edit. My parents sold my childhood home off the coast of Miami and have moved full time to Bainbridge Island near Seattle, but both still show Miami. And I can’t change the names of time zones on the watch. For local time I am stuck with it saying Paris.

But I just found out about a new utility from Microsoft to ease my pain a bit.

Microsoft Time Zone is a cool tool for WinXP that shows a small popup of up to 5 time zones. Any one of them can easily become your current time zone. And configuring them is braindead easy and a right click away. I’ll keep this running for a while to see if it fits for me…..