So, if you have already read our Legal Disclaimer, you should now read these lines about some special facts you should not forget when visiting this site. They may be very useful to avoid misunderstandings and confusion. If there is still anything you do not understand, then feel free to ask us.

Time zones

One of the greatest advantages of internet is the instant world-wide communication. At every moment, you can access documents from the other part of the world without leaving your office or home. In most cases you even do not know where these documents are really located, as we do not know where you are. As this site is often visited by people from Europe as well as from the United States, or Japan, the time is different in every part of the world.
Fortunately, we found one alternative - the site concerns Slovakia, so if we can, we are using the current time in Slovakia. This timezone, often called Central European Time (CET) covers most of the Europe. If you live in Moscow, then add two hours to get your local time. Visitors from New York should substract 6 hours, and people from the Western Coast of USA will have to substract 9 hours.

Date and Time Format

To keep Slovak rules as standard (mainly not to confuse people with foreign rules) on this page, we do not use the American system month/day/year (12/24/1999). The long format is 24 December 1999, and the shorter just 24-Dec-1999. We prefer to use the three-letters abbreviations of English months (Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec) rather than numeric signs.
In Slovakia (as in the majority of European countries), the week begins on Monday and ends on Sunday. This is what we respect also on our pages. The days are written by all letters, or just by the first three letters (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun).
Concerning the time format, we use both 24 and 12-hours system independently, so 7pm equals 19:00.

Currency Units

The Slovak Koruna (Slovak Crown, Couronne, Krone,...) is the official currency unit in the Slovak Republic. We are often referring to this currency. Usually we note is as Sk, SK or SKK. If you find in any (mostly historical textes) term Kcs or CSK, it means the Czechoslovak Koruna, that was used in the former Czechoslovakia (until 1992). It's a fact that in the recent decades, there was no hyper-inflation, so the value of money did not change dramatically. There was no "erasing of three zeros on banknotes" like in some other post-communist countries. In 1993, one Czechoslovak Koruna was exchanged for one Slovak Koruna or one Czech Koruna.
As the currency exchange rates change every day, we are often putting also the current equivalent in USD, or recently in Euro.

Numbers

When writing numbers, we use decimal point ".", and usually we put commas "," between the thousands and millions: 1,234,567.80
We realized the problem of distinguishing European "milliards" and American "billions", both expressing 1,000,000,000. As we do not deal with numbers larger than these, we decided to use "billions" instead of "milliards". So one thousand millions - it is already billion. Just to note, in Slovakia is officially used: milion (10⁶), miliarda (10⁹), bilion (10^¹²), biliarda (10^¹⁵), trilion (10^¹⁸), triliarda (10^²¹) etc...

Lenghts and Weights

We use the metric system, so we have meters, grams, liters, square kilometers,...
So for example 1 meter (1m = 100cm) equals 39.37 inches or 3.28 feet. One centimeter (1cm) makes less than 0.4 inches. One kilometer (1km = 1000m) equals about 1093 yards.
For surfaces, we use square meters (m2 or m²), which are 10.8 square feet. One square kilometer (km2 or km²) makes about 0.39 sq.mi.
Volumes - we use liters (1 cubic decimeter), which is about 0.26 gallon (0.22 British Gallon), or 34 ounces (35 British ounces), or even 2.1 pints. There are 1000 mililiters in one liter (1ml is a cubic centimeter).
For weights, we use kilograms (one kilogram, it is in fact the weight of one liter of water), which make 35 ounces or 2.2 pounds.

Temperature

In 1742 the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius published a paper in the "Kungliga Swenska Wetenskaps Academiens Handlingar", the Annals of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, entitled "Observations on two persistent degrees on a thermometer".
... and since then we measure temperature in degrees Celsius. However, we can help those using Fahrenheit's system: If you have a temperature in degrees Celsius, just multiply it by 5, divide by 9 and add 32.

Anything else?

This is just a very short list of basic rules you should remember when visiting this site. You will discover other later. However, if you think we should include a new rule here, please email us. Thank you,

Slovakia Daily Surveyor Team