title: How do I set Time.zone to UTC and keep it that way?
body: <p>I have a Rails 3 application on Ruby 1.9.2 in which users enter business hours and they are stored in a MySQL database.  When a user does this, however, the entered time "8:00 AM" gets stored as 3pm in the database.  I want it to be stored as they entered it, regardless of time zone.  I figured the best way to do this is to set everything to UTC and have it ignore my time zone (Arizona), but Rails seems to be ignoring my setting.  Example:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Time.zone = 'UTC'
  
  mon_open_date = Time.parse(params[:venue][:mon_open_at]) rescue nil
  
  # =&gt; 2011-04-27 08:00:00 -0700
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The result in MySQL:</p>
  
  <pre><code>+-------------+
  | mon_open_at |
  +-------------+
  | 15:00:00    |
  +-------------+
  1 row in set (0.00 sec)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>