title: parse a date to utc unixtime
body: <p>a commandline program i am writing accepts dates as arguments. i need to convert these to a utc unix timestamp for internal use within the program. so far i have the following test script, but its not working:</p>
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import time
  &gt;&gt;&gt; from dateutil import parser
  &gt;&gt;&gt; t = parser.parse(&quot;2009-01-10&quot;)
  &gt;&gt;&gt; print int(time.mktime(t.timetuple()))
  1231507800
  </code></pre>
  <p>checking this on <a href="http://www.unixtimestamp.com/index.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">unixtimestamp.com</a>:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>1231507800</p>
  <p>Is equivalent to:</p>
  <p>01/09/2009 @ 1:30pm (UTC)</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>however i want it back at midnight. i think my computer is using my local timezone, when i want to use utc at every stage.</p>