Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 5
            "January 25, 1998 -  705 days to go."  WRP61
                               FINAL
    (c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
reproduce this article as long as this entire document is reproduced in
its entirety including this notice.  I do not grant permission to
a commercial publisher to reprint this in print media.

As seen in
   USENET:comp.software.year-2000
   http://www.elmbronze.demon.co.uk/year2000/
   http://www.kiyoinc.com/HHResCo.html

Please fax or email copies of this to your geek pals, especially those
idiots who keep sending you lightbulb, blonde, or Bill Gates jokes,
and urban legends like the Arizona rocket car story.

If you have a Y2K webpage, feel free to host the Weather Reports.

Don't forget- April 2, 3 1998, Geek Out.
Project Dumbass needs you.

1. DC Y2K Meeting.
2. Rates
3. Giving up on c.s.y2k?
4. Back to Hoboken
5. Hams v. Y2K
6. CCCC

-------- DC Y2K Meeting ---------------

As usual the food was great, hot servers of sesame steak, fried 
butterfly shrimp, spinich rolls, 6 kinds of cheese, slices of salmon, a fruit
table, bread, crackers, open bar with soft drinks, wine, beer including a 
brand called "Snowball's Chance Beer".  -I need another notch in my belt- 
Urp-Burp.

Several c.s.y2k'ers attended, Rick Cowles, Greg90210, DD, and some
lurkers, Adrian, Kate, Jay, Jonathan.  I'm sure there were others but I didn't
have a chance to meet them, there were at least 200 attendees.

It was a good gathering, Rick held court and shocked the troops with his 
"lights out!" message.  DD was, DD, what can I say. 

The topic was risks, coming to terms with the crash, triage, contingencies. 
DC Y2K'ers know that we won't make it, this is not open to debate, the issue 
is, what do we do about it.

Bruce Webster - Corp and Gov will not get it done in time.  No death bed 
repentance, failure discovered too late to correct.

Steve Davis, http://www.erols.com/steve451, disaster recovery, risk management
team separate from Y2K team.

Geroge Peterson, Richmond HUD, current contingency plans are worthless, 
recovery strategies, go manual,

Joe Clement, They think they'll meet the date because the date can't change, 
contingencies, damage control, transitioning back to normal.

Liz McInerney, VP Fidelity Investments, Y2K contingency planning is different.
Unbelievable problem, 55 people in Y2K program office.  

Doug Carmichael, http://www.tmn.com/~doug, proposed that people use the coming
collapse to seek and build a better infrastructure,

Next month: the embedded problem.

-------- Rates ------------------------

From the DC Y2K meeting...  In the open forum, they discussed quarter 
million/year W2 COBOL in 1999 as if it were a sure thing.

One of the attendees whispered "I'm getting $125/hour and they're not even 
blinking."  

Of course, killjoy that he is, DD reported a call for an MVS systems 
programmer for a short term assignment, $40/hour.  Uh DD, that's what the guy
who cleans my gutters gets, I'll give him the lead.

-------- Giving up on c.s.y2k ? -----------

Several c.s.y2k'ers have dropped out recently.  I'm on the verge of doing it 
too.  I gave up on Peter de Jager's listserv last year because it was almost
all manager fluff.  I will monitor c.s.y2k but limit my posting.  I'll still
work on the WRPs and will try to keep to a schedule, about one a week,
hopefully by Monday morning. 

I'll also check into the y2k chatline on a regular basis. Maybe Tuesday night
from 8-9 EST.

So best case, I spend a couple hours working on a WRP during the weekend, a
half hour a day looking at c.s.y2k, and hit the chatroom on Tuesday for an 
hour.
 
-------- Back to Hoboken and DC  --------

I'm heading back to Newark again, again.  What a treat to escape from DC for
a few hours, again.   On my Monday trip, I met one of our c.s.y2k'ers, who
turned out to be a nice looking, lady-code-cranker, tall, dark hair, kinda
southern European looking. -hint- -hint- to any single c.s.y2kers.

Of course, she was appalled to see the results of years of professionally
consuming Twinkies and Yo-ho's, a big gulp Pepsi for breakfast, the Minoxidil
failures, and ... geez Cory, why don't you take better care of yourself, get
help for your eating disorder...

Hey, I have the physique of a conditioned athlete... ...what?  Sumo isn't an
Olympic sport?

...she won my heart...  started talking about stainless steel stoves and apple
strudel...

We drew diagrams of 9X2's connected to EMC RAID boxes, plotted and schemed to 
bring Y2K to the unwashed of Manhattan and got my client to take us to lunch,
chicken w/ rosemary for me,  French Onion soup and a salad for her. Is life
good? My client pays for me to spend a day away from DC and buys lunch for me
and a lady from c.s.y2k.  The chicken was listed as a pasta dish, but didn't
come with pasta... why?

After more Y2K talk, she left, abandoned me to the clutches of my client, 
two mean and surly people who tortured me until I begged for a five minute
snack break.  The short one held my arms while the tall one slapped me around. 
It was grueling.

They made me promise to come up again this week.  Yippee, more frequent flyer
miles, airplane snacks.  Not going to Hoboken this time, from the Newark 
Airport we're going somewhere to check up on a company, some company, 
somewhere...

Whoops, the TV news reports that 44 police officers were arrested but it's 
not in DC!  What's going on here?  How dare they?

Back from Newark again, I was there for five hours... and let me tell you, I
earned the money, we had a issue that had to be resolved. 

-------- Hams v. Y2K?  --------------

A DC Y2K'er, concerned about the collapse of the communications infrastructure
asked about Ham radio, about the possibility of getting a license and 
organizing the Hams in his company to provide essential communications for his
company.

Not a bad idea.  Before you Hams point out that it is not legit for a Ham
to carry commercial traffic for hire, the assumption is that the phone service
has failed and this is essential traffic for the good of society. 

The source of info is the ARRL, the American Radio Relay League, 
they probably have a website....  Oops, I just had a massive senior moment, 
after typing the word website, I went looking for it (it's probably 
http://www.arrl.org), decided to see if anything was happening at
http://www.jennni-cam.org, it wasn't. Everyone else has seen hanky-panky on 
Jenni-cam, All I've ever seen is an empty room.  Looked at c.s.y2k again,
checked my mail, found the 'lotsa programmers' manifesto, wrote a reply, 
became woozy,  staggered upstairs and barely made it to bed still wearing
my streetclothes except I think I managed to kick off one shoe.  6 hours of 
vibrant snoring later, a-hack, ha-hack-a-lugie, stagger back down to the 
computer, bring up c.s.y2k, coffee, more c.s.y2k, better jot some notes about 
the DC Y2K meeting, Dir a:wrp61.*, FILE NOT FOUND?  What?  Look at the active 
task...  there it is!  I didn't save it last night.  It was in the editor all 
night.

Where am I?  Oh-oh, check with the ARRL about licensing.  I think there is a
no-code starter license that you can get with a couple days of prepping for 
the exam.   Licensing is a ladder scheme and nominal HF voice privileges takes
about 3 months of concentrated effort, morse at 13 WPM, FCC regs, operating 
procedures, and electronics.

With a VHF license, you can talk to hams within a 50 mile radius, 100 
miles if the repeaters stay up, 50 miles otherwise.  With HF priviledges, you 
will be able to talk around the world with a 100 watts of SSB.   The next
sunspot peak will be just about Y2K day.  I can't wait.

The essentials are good antennas and emergency power. 

-------- Cory's closing clueless comments ----

This last year has taken a toll on me.  I stumble, geeze, natter, but as
confused as I am, Management is far more confused.  How else did we get 
into this mess?  I can't remember where I left the corymobile so I always park
it at the far end of a parking lot.  I can't remember the code, so I write
clear documentation and keep notes on my systems development.  Sometimes, I'll
go back to work on a program and find a PLM with state transition diagrams,
file layouts, flow of control and calling sequences, and a naming convention.
Did I do that?  I must have but I don't remember doing it.

I know I have to do this but the horn-hairs will get in the sauce at noon, go 
on junkets, buy a bunch of Pee Cee toys, and SURPRISE! discover that they 
blew the entire budget.... and next quarter do it again.  Don't they ever 
learn?

Have they left?  Any PHM, Horn-hairs around? ....just us geeks?  Good. You!
Watch the door, I wanted to talk to you geeks in private.  It's looking pretty
bad, just yesterday, I ran into another denial-head.  There are still places
where no work is getting done, lots of meetings, pretty forms, people going to
seminars, processes and procedures being refined, terms are being defined, and
now there are 705 days left.

It's obvious that we're not going to make it and the systems will unravel. 
Here's the proof, if Fidelity has been pressing hard since 1996 and they 
haven't announced remediation, if BoA is paying 50 Million in bonuses, or was
it 80 Million, if they couldn't do the work in the last year or two, no one, 
perhaps not even them, will hit the wall with the solid, remediated and tested
systems.

If a Fidelity or Bank Boston or Fannie Mae isn't done, considering the 
resources they've been throwing against the problem, none of the others will 
get it done, especially those still doing powerpoint, holding 'what should we
define as a *system*' meetings'.

If they can't get it done in the next 708 days, there is no way they're going
to get anything done in the first 180 days of 2000.  If it's just a simple fix
at 2:00 AM of January 1, 2000, well, make the simple fix now and announce to
the world how easy it is.

We have some items working in our favor, by talking up rates, I've focused 
some of you geeks on honing your legacy skills.  You know who you are, you've 
gotten smarter on COBOL, JCL, VSAM, etc.  You may have done it for greed, you
may have done it to help save the world...  it's looking like you'll be 
helping to rebuild the world.

By talking up rates, we've attracted others to our side,  sales of COBOL for
Dummies are up and classes in how to fix code are starting.  Geek 
wannabes can help, don't let them run wild in the code, supervise them 
closely, watch what they do but people tell me that a couple nubies supervised
by a battle hardened vet-geek can accomplish a lot.

This mess will continue until 2003; I thought the screaming was going to
start last summer, it didn't, I was wrong.  Instead of screaming in 1997 
because they figured out that it's real, it's heading our way, and it has to 
be fixed, they'll be screaming in January 2000 because the production systems 
are broken and the CEO fires the CIO and entire IT staff that told him, no
problem or we're on top of it.

I know some mid-managers have been saying, geeks want $xxx/hour,
we're not going to pay it, we won't be held up.  Anyone who tries to hold us 
up will not work here ever.  Tuff talk... loser.  Let's put these dumbasses on
record.  If they say it in a meeting, make sure it's part of the minutes.  If 
a memo or email is sent around, keep a copy.  This may be another varient of
Project Dumbass.   Sign up for one of those anonymous web accounts and post to
c.s.y2k,  ...company xyz corp and joe shmoe the CIO is doing the following
dumbass thing...

They had the chance to hire heavy-duty legacy-pros at $60/hour last spring,
$90/hour last summer.  If you want the best, you pay the best.  Is that hard 
to understand?  

Every month that the work doesn't get done means that the cost of remediation 
goes up.  They can pay the geeks now while rates are still low or pay a 
bundle of boodle in 2000 when the systems are crashing and no-one is available
at any price.

Some Geeks are hanging in with companies that are not paying a fair rate. 
They feel the work is important, they have a sense of loyalty, all good 
reasons.  Over the next few months, we're going to have to help each other, 
some companies may bomb out, sell out, close down divisions.  Others may drive
geeks into deathmarch conditions.  We need to help each other.  This is more 
than Five Guys Cobol, this is one geek watching out for another.

Check out http://www.ntplx.net/~rgearity any evening, 8-10PM EST.  Lots of
hot Y2K talk.  I may waddle in on Tuesday evenings if there are enough snacks.

705 days to go now.