Ken,
I thought I'd try to impress you & everyone by understanding what's going on with the date thing you brought up - all I got was a headache for my effort.
Actually, Dave is correct. You would change your profile settings (bottom of your profile page) to display whatever format you wish. (with or without day, time, etc. Also, correct for your time zone.)
Now for the headache part, the rules are available at the link just to the left of the setup portion (
http://us2.php.net/date ). It goes on and on. According to that (long) page, I could even display sun-up time for any day??? Jees, why would I ever want that?

It would be
almost like the day before!
And yes, before you log in, you will see the default time/date setting. I can't see the default because I can't log out (while I'm here).