January 20th, 2008

English language usage - How to refer to future dates

A couple years ago, Lacey and I had an argument about the correct wording for referring to upcoming dates.

For example, what does “This Sunday” mean? What about “Next Sunday”?

Lacey ended up winning that argument, for some reason, so ever since then I’ve tried to speak/interpret these phrases carefully, conscientiously trying to use what she taught me back then. As it turns out, she does seem to be right about the general rules for using these future date words. I’ve paid attention every time I’ve heard anyone mention “this {x}” or “next {x}”, ever since that discussion/argument. But it’s definitely a source of ambiguity that bothers me whenever I hear these terms used.

She told me [something like]:

When referring to the next day {x} that will occur, it’s called “this {x}”.

When referrnig to the day {x} after that, it’s called “next {x}”.

So, since today is Sunday, January 20, 2008:

  • this Wednesday is January 23, 2008
  • next Wednesday is January 30, 2008

*** fast forward to last night ***

We had an upcoming event to write on the calendar on the fridge. Lacey told me “Next Saturday” at 4:30pm. Since it was Saturday, January 19, 2008 when she said that, I first interpreted it (based on what I learned from Lacey way back then) as Saturday, Februrary 2, 2008.

But, she was actually talking about Saturday, January 26, 2008. I called her out on that, because it screamed “inconsistency” at me. After a brief review of what we talked about back then, I still don’t feel 100% certain of the English language rules deal with future dates.

I found a couple similar questions on Yahoo Answers, tonight:

But none of the answers on those questions linked to any authoritative Enlglish Language sources.

Does anyone know of any websites that might help me straighten this out, once and for all? A web page that even somewhat resembles an official English language rule/guideline/etc. regarding “this/next (day_of_week)” usage would be greatly appreciated. If you know of any, PLEASE leave a Comment, below! Thanks!

Posted by spugbrap at 04:35am EST 2 Comments 

Categories: dates, grammar, speech, confusion, terminology, ambiguity, language, time, annoyance, english, personal

June 20th, 2006

getting the current date in a particular format in Windows XP/2003

I needed to get the current date, in the format ‘yyyy-MM-dd’, and use that value multiple times within a batch file.

The command ‘DATE /T’ returns a date like this:
Tue 06/20/2006

But I needed:
2006-06-20

Now, this would have been extraordinarily easy, if I could use 4nt, cygwin, nclip, or any number of other tools. However, my options were limited on the machine that I needed to run this on, as it is a production web application server. So, I had to come up with a way to do this using the tools I had available to me:
- Windows 2003 Server (assumed to be a default installation, or more minimal than that)
- Sybase ASE 12.5.x
- Java

I probably could have just written a simple java application to do this, but where’s the fun in THAT? :)

So, I consulted with my good friend, Jeff Scanlon, as I usually do when I have an interesting tech challenge, and together we came up with this batch file [NOTE: you can download it here, if the code gets too munged with the blogger html/css]:

—— BEGIN BATCH FILE ——-

@echo off
REM generate SQL script to get date in correct format:
echo select ’set my_date=’ + str_replace(convert(char(20),getdate(),102),’.',’-') >%TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql
echo go >>%TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql

REM run the SQL script to generate a simple, temporary batch file:
isql -U username -P password -i %TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql | findstr set >%TEMP%\set_my_date.bat

REM run the temporary batch file, which will set an environment variable, ‘MY_DATE’, to contain the date:
call %TEMP%\set_my_date.bat

REM clean up
del /q %TEMP%\set_my_date.bat
del /q %TEMP%\getDate_yyyy-MM-dd.sql

REM this is where you’d actually put code that uses the date, like:
REM md c:\backup\%MY_DATE%
REM copy c:\mystuff\*.* c:\backup\%MY_DATE%

—— END BATCH FILE ——-

Posted by spugbrap at 02:24pm EDT 3 Comments 

Categories: dates, commandline, tools, sql, sybase, windows, howto, scripting, geek