Okay, I just went back and looked at my time function I always use and it adjusts for the fact that my servers are always in California (Pacific time +10800 equals Eastern time). Amazing that I could've forgot I did that and it's always worked out with the servers being in the same timezone.

I'd like to thank everyone who replied and I appreciate the JavaScript timezone discovery idea. I also agree about php's time functions being robust. I simply used
date("M j, Y g:i A", time())
to generate the readable time whereas my old Perl function I wrote long ago is about 20 lines long to do the same thing!

Thanks again,
CS