search for: discharge_date_relative_to_today

Hi, I was wandering if anyone could help me with this problem: Right now I am using a field in my database which is of type ''Date'' (in the form dd-mm-yyyy). I would like to convert this value (for example 26-06-08) into a number of seconds since epoch or into another form so I can compare it with todays date (from Date.now) so that I can tell the difference between the two dates