Friggatriskaidekaphobia and Unix time

Its Friday the 13th - an unlucky day according to some.  But of course every day is unlucky for some and my superstition filter is working harder today than most others.  I'm ready to point out the logical fallacies in people's anecdotes about the day - and no doubt they will grumble at me for doing so.

Apparently it is only since the 19th century that this day has been considered particularly unlucky although people were already wary of Fridays in the 14th century.  Every year we have at least one of them, and some years we have three.

Not wishing to fuel world-wide friggatriskaidekaphobia - the fear of Friday the thirteenth - I have chosen one surprising but entirely harmless story for the day.  As regular readers will know, I am an (amateur) user of the Ubuntu operating system, which is a member of the Unix/Linux family. 

'Unix time' reached 1,234,567,890 seconds on Friday, February 13, 2009.

I expect you feel that your life is now enriched!

And one more thing!

Blogger is back in operation again, today Friday 13th!

You might have noticed that there was no post yesterday, for the first time since I started writing on 11th January.  It seems that blogger caused worldwide outrage by going into read-only mode for a couple of days.  Those of us who use it regularly started to feel withdrawal symptoms and today turned out to be a lucky day after all. 

Whatever all the other users say, I think it is a little churlish to complain when the service is (after all) entirely free and extremely reliable.  Where would you get better value for money than this?