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Can you guess what happened on October 14, 1582?

All nominations in INSIDEtracc were created! Ok, that may not be exactly right, but you wouldn't know it by looking in the Create Date column for any given nomination in INSIDEtracc. The create date field currently defaults to the system default date of 10/14/1582. Look below* for the rest of the story!

On Tuesday evening, October 15, 2002, California Gas Transmission will upgrade the INSIDEtracc nomination system. One of the minor changes customers will see is that the create date for nominations will now reflect the actual date the nomination was created by the user.

The other minor change can be seen in the Confirmed Nominations and Scheduled Volumes (100 Report). This report will now include one additional column labeled "Dnstm Ctrct." This column will show downstream contract numbers, which are required for any nominations to off-system delivery points (DD destinations).

The CGT Gas Scheduling Group is available to answer any questions you may have about INSIDEtracc upgrades. Please save your Gregorian calendar questions for your encyclopedia!

* Many computer programs use the number of days since October 14, 1582 as a way of calculating the day of the week. This default date is the one seen in INSIDEtracc. In fact, no such date exists!

The current Western Calendar is referred to as the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII. Up until October 4, 1582, the Julian calendar, named after Julius Caesar, was used. Because a day is slightly longer than 24 hours, the less accurate Julian calendar failed to account for 'leap year' days, and 'extra' time "accumulated" every day.

To fix this problem, Pope Gregory decreed that the day following Thursday, October 4, 1582 would be Friday, October 15, 1582, in effect 'deleting' 11 days from the calendar. On the evening of October 4, 1582, people went to sleep and woke up to a calendar that said they were 11 days older, on what became October 15, 1582, and the beginning of the Gregorian calendar.

In Catholic countries the new calendar was used almost immediately. Most Protestant countries, including England and its colonies - some of which later became the United States -- did not adopt the change until almost two hundred years later, in 1752, when September 3rd became September 14, 1752.

And now you know the rest of the story.