Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 15
"April 8, 1998 - 632 days to go." WRP71
FINAL
(c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in
its entirety. You may optionally quote an individual article but you should
include this header down to the tearline. 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
--------------------tearline -----------------------------
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.
Did you miss Geek Out?
Project Dumbass needs you.
In this issue:
1. Hoboken Again
2. Geek Out Day 2
3. Money Watch 2
4. CCCC
---------- Hoboken Again ------------------
Heading up on Thursday, got a couple meetings, hope to have some fun, eat some
gooooood NY deli food, maybe an egg cream too.
---------- Geek Out Day 2 -----------------
Cleaned the cory-mobile, tossed out the food wrappers and found the floor...
so that's where the french frys went... took it to the quickee-lube, No, I
don't want the fuel injection or transmission serviced... $22.50 and 10
minutes later, var-rooom, fast cars, the 5 speed clicks from gear to gear, as
the 16 valve engine tachs to the 6,800 redline, sunroof cranked back, classic
rock and roll on the six speaker stereo.
Got to the appointment at 10:45, having fasted since midnight the night
before, I was starving and slightly dizzy. Filled out a bunch of nosy
forms, occupation Software Consultant (not 'developer'), insurance, etc.
Then... say, why exactly are you here?
For a full-up physical.
Well, we don't have a record of your appointment...
10 minutes of blurry discussion followed, I recall the nurse saying that
she needed to slap someone around and asking to speak to the Doc, then
he came in and said that they had a no-show for a physical so he could
see me in place of the no-show. Everyone was very apologetic.
There wasn't a no-show, they wrote someone else's name in the slot. This
was another case of a system confusing the people. They blamed it on their
appointment computer system.
Vitals; BP 120/80, pulse 70, digital exam... whoa, oh-ooH. no problems but at
your age, it's time to think about the garden hose of joy...
uh, maybe next year.
Other questions? Well doc, in the mornings, after I ha-rumph, a-hack a
few times, I stagger around for 5 mintutes, sometimes I have to hold
the wall or I'll fall over, what is that?
Arthritis. We all get a little joint deterioration, starts at about
45-50. You have to take it easy for a few minutes until the joints free
up, a hot bath will help get the circulation going.
They took a bunch of blood, the doc explained that Blue Cross probably
wouldn't cover some of the work. Those S.O.B.s, I write them huge checks
every three months. One month I had to dip into my savings to meet the
payments. The doc shrugged... it's even worse for my medicaid patients, you
think that they'd pay for preventive care, as a diagnostician, my job is to
find the problems early, when it's easy to fix them...
Short sighted... where have we heard that before. ...oh, yeah, Y2K. Let it
break and then do a heart transplant rather than start early and maybe prevent
the problem with a little exercise, better diet, and some safe medication.
I got a tetanus shot, my last one was in 1984-5; they're generally good for 10
years unless you get a massive injury, then they downgrade the protection to 5
years. The rest of the family is current with their tetanus. I asked about
other innoculations, he said that unless you're visiting a third-world
country, you don't need anything else... except hepatitus-B, if you're a
health care worker or sex-industry pro, you need that too. Of course, if the
U.S. becomes a third-world country....
After the appointment, heard that the local megabank, Crestar took a mega
computer outage, from Wednesday through Friday, the bank was not able to coax
their computers to disclose their depositor's balances. We know you have an
account, we just don't know how much money is in the account. Oh, and on Y2K,
there won't be a problem.
Oh-oh, there's a Roy Rogers, I'll take a burger, fries, and a large coke
made with mystery chemicals. What luxury, a big greasy burger and a Washington
Post, turn a page, chew up a fry.
I went to Dawsons, not exactly Glen Slade's Hunting World (Houston, TX) but a
good place to window shop during Geek Out. Dawsons had some nice S&W .22LR
wheelguns in stainless, 3 inch barrel looks about right. One of those would
last hundreds of years and fifty bucks buys more ammo than you'll ever need.
A .22LR, especially loaded with hypervelocity hollow points, is plenty.
They didn't have a .22LR conversion kit for the AR-15 or the 4X scope designed
for it. The Aimpoints looked nice but what's the sense of a scope that only
works if you have a battery?
Then it was over to Lucky World. No, DD, not Get-Lucky World. Lucky World is
an Asian supermarket on Route 50. Picked up a 20 lb bag of Kukoho Rose Yellow
label rice for $8.99. Lucky world has a buffet, a deli with the strangest
Korean delicacies imaginable, seaweeds, crabs, roots, food that looks back at
you with sad eyes, thousands of eyes.
Took in "As Good as it Gets", yeah-yeah, it's a chick-flick, but, hey, Jack
Nicholson is cool, There's a Y2K relevant part to the story. Helen Hunt's
character, a waitress, has a son with a chronic disease. She can only
afford to take him to the emergency rooms and to HMO docs who provide 3rd rate
care. Nicholson's character, Melvin, pays for a top doc to treat Helen's
son, -sob-, it's so heart warming.
"They didn't run a standard allergy test, little needle pricks?" No.
"I think I can help?" Helen's mom starts crying.
This doc makes house calls, can get lab work turned around in a couple hours,
takes calls from his patients at his home, "You talk to me, my home number is
on my card."
Why Y2K? The discount remediation houses are the HMO's, promise a lot but
when you need them, you get a clueless nubie, a different one every time, and
your system gets sicker.
The Y2K factories are the emergency rooms, shoddy care, rushed, no guarentees,
bury their mistakes.
Some of us are like the expensive doc, You talk to me. You want your problem
solved, you need a real specialist and like that doc, we don't need your work,
you need a reference to get to us, we're doing you a favor.
Ah, Geek Out day 2... I got a where-are-you email from another client. It's
working, they missed me. I got a lot of important personal things done, had
some fun.
---------- Money Watch 2 -------------------
Organization 1997 1998 1999 Total
General Motors $40M $500M
Sabre $21M $74M $95M
Liz Claiborne $11M $25M $24M $60M
Sabre talks, "...significant internal labor costs as well as consulting and
other expenses to prepare its systems for the Year 2000."
Liz sez, "...failure to implement the project on a timely basis could have a
material adverse effect on operations."
Look at the numbers... Sabre is tripling its Y2K budget, Liz Claiborne is
more than doubling. An airline reservations company is in a savage fight with
a vendor of fashion wear for technologists. Liz, take me, I'm yours.
Sure S/390 experts are a fungible commodity. An assembler gearhead can work
on reservations systems or haute couture inventories. That doesn't mean we're
cheap, it means we can get a job anywhere.
The smart company would look at these numbers and realize that they have to
lock in the staff, this means paying big bucks, and continuing to pay as this
market develops. Thanks to Senator Bob Bennett and Arthur Levitt, the numbers
are available and they are more shocking than any of us realized.
There is no way that GM or Sabre will be done by the end of 1998; even if they
were; they would keep the staff on standby-retainer during the testing in 1999
and the operations of 2000.
GM and Sabre aren't saying their 1999 budget is zero, they're saying they
can't predict the budget yet.
---------- CCCC --------------
I've added some items to the webpage, more WRPs, the budgets of large
organizations. Great for rubbing in the face of denial-heads.
On Wed, 8 Apr 1998 08:10:03, "Jim Abel" wrote:
> >Bryan Cowan wrote...
> >I personally don't think that I'll live through Y2K, so
> >I've decided to live my life to the fullest with the year
> >and a half I have left.
> >
>
> Plan for a thousand years. Live like you'll die tomorrow.
Right... and even in horrific scenarios, I'm thinking WWII Europe, Georgia in
the path of Sherman, most people didn't take a bullet. The reason, the
numbers. Let's ASS-U-Me that Y2K triggered incidents kill one million people
in the U.S. (including Hawaii and Alaska, which have their own special
problems.) One million calculates out to one person in 250 not counting those
who aren't counted in the census because they're hiding from Immigration.
One is 250 is approximately the rate of people who will drop dead anyway.
...and it's always a surprise, and these are roughly the odds that we live
with every day. Yeah, usually it's great-aunt Abigail, mean as a snake and
chugging 'medicine, some aging entertainer, a White-house insider, or some guy
who works over there in finance who develops a cancer in an embarrassing body
part. It's almost never YOU. Why... you could go a lifetime before it's YOU.
So why should you ASS-U-Me that Y2K is the grim reaper and he's coming for
YOU.
Anywho... look at your high risk behaviours. Big killer, heart disease,
smart money says get conditioned, vegetarian diet, which doesn't mean a palm
oil cocktail, make love once a day, spend an hour listening to classical music
with your eyes closed. Do you do that or did you have the grease fried
special for lunch yesterday, drive home with WHFS 99.1 cranked up?
Another big killer, Diabetes; strong diet and exercise, lifestyle choices,
risk factors.
Cancer, lots of unknowns but again, vegetarians, the conditioned, do better.
Stroke, a big, big biggie, diet, exercise.
OK, OK, like a CD-player on auto-repeat. But what did you eat yesterday, a
plate of raw vegetables, complex carbohydrates or that steak and cheese with
lots of palm oil based 'Mayo'. Did you do a 3 mile power walk, shower and
join your significant other in joy or did you spend the time bickering,
watching tractor pulls on cable, venting about your idiot boss.
Don't get nuts about Y2K. It's coming, it'll be horrible, but before it hits,
we'll kill 60,000 people in auto accidents and over a million from heart
disease and stroke.
Y2K is serious stuff but no more than cancer, and every 7-11 sells
cancer-inducers.
So you geeks, did you get your exercise, do your stretches, take care of
yourself, you are the warriors of the information age. Sitting Bull,
Kamehameha, Miyamoto Musashi, and now, we geeks at our Pentium-Pro 200 SMP
boxes are uniting for the last big battle of the 20th century. I've already
buried a bunch of DC area code crankers; even now, one is in chemo, another
had an angioplasty, a third is fighting off radiation therapy, so that's three
on the deathwatch list. We're going to need every experienced hand if we're
going to keep the lights on, the wheels of industry turning, and the food,
energy, and goods moving.
Don't any of you choose to die on me...
cory hamasaki Take care of yourselves, know what to fear.