so far i've found two articles on how to change the system timezone

here and here

The system was setup so there was a link called localtime in /usr/share/zoneinfo pointing to a nonexistent /etc/localtime. So I created a a link: /etc/localtime to point to /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern .. thus making the /usr/share/zoneinfo/localtime link valid. Also as one of those articles points out I create the link: /usr/share/zoneinfo/posixrules to point to localtime (renaming the already existing posixrules to posixrules.disabled).

All of this and so far no dice .. gonna play with it a bit more.

Upon examination of the posixrules file (vi) I found one of the only readable texts in it "singapore" ... i'm wondering if this was the default TZ or something.