AHHHHH. Once again I was right on top of the answer, and missed it by an inch... see, I tried using UNIX_TIMESTAMP() on the column and it didn't work. I wasn't sure if you could feed it a column as a value or if you had to enter a hard coded value of some sort, but it turns out that the reason it didn't work is because I had already tried converting the timeout variables with the date() function and never changed them back. So in essence, I switched it from trying to validate 0000-00-00 00:00:00 against 2133421342 to trying to validate 2133421342 against 0000-00-00 00:00:00 . *rolls eyes*

It never ends... never.
-m