$ irb
ruby-1.9.2-p0 > RUBY_DESCRIPTION
=> "ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18 revision 29036) [x86_64-darwin10.4.0]"
ruby-1.9.2-p0 > Time.now
=> 2010-09-07 18:18:38 -0700
ruby-1.9.2-p0 > Time.now.gmtime
=> 2010-09-08 01:18:43 UTC
ruby-1.9.2-p0 > Time.now.strftime('%H:%M %Z')
=> "18:22 PDT"
ruby-1.9.2-p0 > Time.now.gmtime.strftime('%H:%M %Z')
=> "01:22 UTC"
But I don't see any method to show the time in East Coast or Central / Mountain time, or to change the zone to something other than GMT? There seems to have no way to tell strftime() to use a particular time zone when displaying the time.