I find it’s pretty annoying when you have to go log file spelunking only to find all the timestamps are in UTC. But we can set the timezone of the server so when Rails, cron, scripts, etc run, they output more readable dates. You can check your current timezone by just running $ date Thu Mar 21 18:02:49 MST 2012 Or checking the timezone file at $ more /etc/timezone US/Arizona So to change it just