datetime from uuid1 timestamp

[Irmen de Jong]

Kent Tenney wrote:
>> Howdy,
>>
>> I have not found a routine to extract usable
>> date/time information from the 60 bit uuid1 timestamp.
>>
>> Is there not a standard solution?
> 
> 
> I submitted an ASPN recipe to do it.
> 
> http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576420/

I'm interested in the use case for this.
Why would you want to extract the exact timestamp from the uuid?

Can't you just use the uuid as a unique identifier in time (in the abstract sense), and 
work with a second variable that contains the time in a format you can easily process?

--irmen