using the date command

[jekillen]

Hello all;
I have built 4 machines and installed FreeBSD 6.0 in one and 6.2
in the other three. They are all using the wrong date and time.
The last one (v6.2 on ecs mb with AMD64) is the worst. It is telling
me today is Jan 3 2003 PST (I am on the west coast and it is still PDT).
These machines are all web servers. So up until now this has not been
a big issue but a configuration of software is complaining that the 
files
it creates have an older date than the files in the software bundle,
it is time to do something about it. So I am looking at man date and as
I interpret the instructions #date ccyymmddHHMM.ss  (20079282027.00 or
200709282027.00 for instance) is supposed to set the
clock to the current date. But when I run a command with the
current date and time in the above format I get the complaint that
the format string is wrong.
Can anyone be kind enough to give me a quick tutorial on this?
I will be looking seriously into using NTP, but for now I need to
get the date straight. I have entries in apache error log gener
ated by php scripts that are supposed to use its date command.
Thanks in advance for assistance.
Jeff K