I wish ISO 8601 would have been the first one. Then, perhaps, we would not have this: http://xkcd.com/1179/
Outside of '01-JAN-1999', I am forever Googling "TO_DATE Oracle" because the string formats for precision time stamps always turn out to be counter-intuitive, and the exact opposite of what I expect.
Like:
TO_DATE('01-JAN-1999 23:59:59', 'DD-MON-YYYY HH24:MI:SS')