Specific time

People who use this 'Pacific time' nonsense are really annoying me. The Pacific is a large ocean. New Zealand is in the Pacific. So is Japan. So are a lot of other countries. There is more Pacific out there than just the bit next to the US. Why do people use US-centric time expressions when they're writing for an international readership? Do they think nobody uses the Internet outside the US?

I would really appreciate time information I can look up on a standard international time zone converter.

Bloglines was down until 10pm Pacific time the other day. Yes, I know looking it up is easy, but it annoyed me that I had to look it up twice, once to find out what Pacific time was, and then again to find out what time that was in Japan. (Normally I love Bloglines. Only sometimes they got up my nose.) I'd almost recovered from that irritation when Blogger announced today that there would be a 20 minute downtime tomorrow at 4pm (Pacific Time). Is that Wednesday or Thursday? Buggered if I know.