Since it appears you are using rails, you have quite a few options. I suggest reading this article that talks all about time zones.

To convert to PST, both of these are rails-specific methods. No need to re-invent the wheel:

time = Time.parse("07/09/10 14:50")time.in_time_zone("Pacific Time (US & Canada)")

Hope this helps

UPDATE: rails might try to get smart and give the time you specify as a string a time zone. To ensure that the time parses as UTC, you should specify in the string:

time = Time.parse("07/09/10 14:50 UTC")time.in_time_zone("Pacific Time (US & Canada)")

To convert from string form to a date or time object you need to use strptime

require 'date'require 'time'my_time_string = "07/09/10 14:50"to_datetime = DateTime.strptime(my_time_string, "%m/%d/%y %H:%M")    utc_time = Time.parse(to_datetime.to_s).utcpacific_time = utc_time + Time.zone_offset("PDT")puts utc_timeputs pacific_time

This is pure ruby, so there are likely some rails-specific methods you could use specifically for this task, but this should get you started.

require 'time'

If you want pacific time just subtract 25200 seconds from Time.new There is a 7 hour difference between pacific time and GMT.

t = Time.parse((Time.new-25200).to_s)

Then use strftime to format however you want it to look.

puts t.strftime("%A %D at %I:%M%p")