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Comment by schoen | Hacker News Reader

I remember having a party for the billion seconds, which was on September 8, 2001 -- then overshadowed in my memory by the September 11 attack less than three days later.

I also remember another party for Unix time 1234567890, back in 2009, which got an impressive turnout.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/estro/3304453623/in/photolist-... https://www.flickr.com/photos/briankusler/3278099542/in/phot... https://www.flickr.com/photos/estro/3305280994/in/photolist-...

At that party, I made some thyme tea, in honor of time_t. (Later on I learned that thyme tea is actually a thing... I felt like I was just making it up!)

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I remember having a party for the billion seconds

That moment is famous in FreeBSD, because the cvsup tool we were using for distributing the source tree at the time suffered from a "S1G" bug: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2001-Se...

I remember rather quietly celebrating the "binary billion" (2^30), 1073741824 seconds, which coincidentally happened at a memorable time: 2004-01-10 13:37:04.

I was just reflecting back on my billion seconds celebration, and I'm finding it really hard to believe that 500 million seconds have gone by since then. A lot of stuff has happened in my life in the meantime, but that number puts it into perspective.

I didn't think I'd ever find myself in a reflective mood because of a unix timestamp!

We drank a toast to 1234567890 day — it coincided with my wife's birthday.

> I remember having a party for the billion seconds, which was on September 8, 2001

I was going to ask if anyone did!

My first thought was Oh 2B not far off then, I wonder if there's anything being organised -- oh, 2033, there's still time...

It's also interesting that this is a UTC (or at least, it is universally coordinated, whether you can call it UTC or not I suppose depends entirely on the epoch) event - unlike NYE celebrations which span most of the day throughout the world, Unix 1.5B celebrations all over would be at the same 'time'.

But seriously thyme tea sounds pretty awful.

There are many kinds of thyme - one is good for tea (Thymus vulgaris) - but they get confused a lot.

Not only does it taste good (what might get debated) but it is said to help against the common cold and stuff like that. Is being used for centuries now as the "poor man's antibiotics".

A friend later on bought me an Arabic "wild thyme tea", which is labeled as زعتر بري in Arabic. According to Wikipedia, this is thymus serpyllum, which is different from the culinary thyme that we use in the west (although Wikipedia says that kind of thyme is used for tea in Armenia). One more potential source of confusion is that Wikipedia's article on za'atar says that زعتر بري could also be another Middle Eastern thyme (thymus capitatus), or even origanum vulgare (oregano)!

So I'm not positive exactly which herb is in this Arabic tea, but I do like it better than the thyme tea that I made for that party.

Edit: it's this one: http://karabetian.com/food/tea-and-coffee/tazah-wild-thyme-t..., although I'm not sure I would be that comfortable giving my credit card to this web site. I'll see if it's available in my local Arabic market.

I was just typing in random times and saw that it came eerily close to 9/11. Kind of crept me out.

I also remember having a billion seconds party.

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