My SQL is very rusty. It’s been many years. Also, any kind of programming that involves date manipulation is bound to cause headaches. Even the simplest tasks can baffle. However, eventually, I cracked the problem in hand and successfully retrieve a month’s worth of content from the database. This was after coding around the problem of months having different numbers of days, and the additional problem of a server that thinks UK time and a database that thinks US time. Take the date 08/10/01—one will think it’s the eighth of October, the other will think it’s the tenth of August. Grr.
I just don’t get the US date format—I mean, where’s the logic in mm/dd/yyyy? Does it not make sense to go from the smallest aggregate to the largest or vice-versa, rather than a mish-mash of differing values? Of course, if I had my way, all dates would be expressed in the form of yyyymmdd: today would be 20011008. This makes my life so much easier, and would work properly for another 7998 years. Hopefully, by then, the concept of date will itself be irrelevant—as we would probably have evolved into a species of pure thought.