Date Picker values and manipulation (Last question, I swear!)

I have a DatePicker bound to user defaults but the information stored doesn’t seem to be usable in my Applescript.

startupTime = <040b7374 7265616d 74797065 6481e803 84014084 8484064e 53446174 65008484 084e534f 626a6563 74008584 016482f0 c77adc86>;

How can I use this code?

What are you trying to do with the value?

user defaults can handle date objects, so although it looks unusual,
you should retrieve the proper value into a date variable

I need to do two things with the date stored.

The first is I need to take the value, and use the time of it to set the startup time for my machine.

The second is I need to take the time value, convert it to a 24 hour format, and setup a cron job to force shutdown nightly at the specified time.