Probably everyone in the world but me already knew this, but you can put your user time zone into .bashrc like this:
#export time zone
export TZ="/usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Eastern"
If you look in /usr/share/zoneinfo you can see all the zones that there are.
Then when you do a listing, you don't get UTC times unless you want them. Here the dates and times are all US Eastern Time.
~/Projects/$ date
Wed May 22 07:18:44 EDT 2013
~/Projects/$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 greg registered_users 0 May 22 06:42 hello.py
drwxrwxr-x 2 65432 registered_users 4096 May 9 03:33 tangerine
I probably knew this back in the dim reaches of memory, but these days most OS installs just ask you for the time zone, so I'd forgotten you can do it manually.
-greg