>After so many years in the military, I was accustomed to YYYYMMDD or DDMMYYYY. Now that I have been a 'civilian' for many years, I have adjusted back to the typical American MMDDYYYY and now read dates that way automatically. You will probably find that most use the Brit or European date format and we are once again - the lone wolf. :o)

After all these years I have got used to the outta-this-world units of measure in use here. I even, sort of, have some idea when something is expressed in ounces - how heavy would that be. Not that I can translate ounces into pounds that easily, even if the ratio is a round number (in hex, that is :). I can even speak in miles and have some idea of what the temperatures mean without recalculating. Never tried psi->kPa, or ft³-gal or ft³-l.

The idea of using weird units of measure isn't completely unknown back home - it's just obsolete. There are two area units still in use among peasants - you can buy a chain of land, or a morning of land, one of which probably corresponds to an acre, though I'd have no idea which one. And plank thickness is either one inch or two inch, and the plumbing diameters is also in inches - but not drainage, it's 50, 110, 160 (millimeters). Everything else that I can think of is metric. BTW, did you meet pfund in Germany? The German pound was rounded up to 500g at some point. I remember I once checked my weight on a scale at a railway station, and it said "Sie wiegen 160 halbe-kilo" :).

But the dates still get me every now and then. And you can imagine my confusion - my date setting on UT is dd/mm/yyyy, my machine date setting is dd.mm.yyyy, but the dates on other machines around the house are mm/dd/yyyy, the dates on anything printed are most probably just mm/dd (or m/d), and for my own handwritten notes, when I care to keep them, I try to remember to use our old format with Roman numerals for months - today is 21-XII-2006. And, ah - in Hungary they use yyyy-mm-dd, because they also speak so, so I was used to that for a while.