As a followup, try the code snippet in this node.. it requires Date::Manip to be installed, and allows the specification of parameters, such as minute, hour and day.. ie: you can check to see the epoch time in seconds, 2 hours ago from the present time..

I don't know if you're running this in Win32 or Unix, but if its Win32,Linux or Solaris and if you have ActivePerl, you don't need a C compiler to install Date::Manip, because the PPM repository has it compiled and ready to install..
HTH