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Sunday, October 10, 2010

10/10/10!

I think it's really cool that today's date is 10/10/10!

And for once, I don't have to wonder if the date is written American style (October 10, 2010) or British style (10 October 2010).

For example, tomorrow's date will be written 10/11/10 in the US and 11/10/10 here in the UK.

I had a Spanish language teacher once who was from Spain, who lived in the US and traveled back and forth often between the US and Spain.  She had a great idea how to keep the dates straight: she wrote Roman numerals for the month. That way it didn't matter if she wrote the date US style or European style, she always knew which was the day and which was the month.  So today would be 10/X/10 in Europe or X/10/10 in the US.  Either way, she knew the X was the tenth month so it didn't matter if it was in the first or second position.

I've always thought that was really smart but have never adopted it myself. I usually write the month abbreviation when I'm writing a date so I don't have to wonder which is the day and which is the month.

How do you write dates?

4 comments:

  1. And in binary 101010 is 42 Deep Thought HGTG was right!!!

    Today is also the release date of Ubuntu 10.10 the Linux operating system I use on a few machines here.

    I wonder why we have different conventions for dates (US v Europe) pity we can't standardise things.

    and at 10:10:10 on 10/10/10 that will be quite a moment... about 20 minutes time for me!

    Steve

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  2. In German, you either write "10. Oktober 2010" or "10.10.10" - its always "Day.Month.Year."

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  3. I'm in the US but used to work for a global company where I had to email with co-workers around the world on a daily basis. Everyone wrote dates as 10 Oct 2010 to avoid confusion. It worked well for me since I had always written by dates that way.

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  4. Again, late to the comments I am, but here goes!
    10th of October is my best friend's birthday, and I think he went and celebrated BIG time!

    My way of writing dates is a bit of a mish-mash between styles, as I attended German school until high school, so I would also write it like Iris (10.10.10)for mostly school related stuff. I think it was in HS when I also started writing the month in numerals on my drawings (in order to save space and avoid confusion), but when writing letters I would, and still, use the written form (10th October, 2010 or October 10th, 2010).
    to sum up, it basically depends on the type of document I'm putting a date in, and also, my mood.

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