Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 26
"June 24, 1998 - 555 days to go." WRP82
(c) 1997, 1998 Cory Hamasaki - I grant permission to distribute and
reproduce this newsletter as long as this entire document is reproduced in
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As seen in
USENET:comp.software.year-2000
http://www.elmbronze.demon.co.uk/year2000/
http://www.kiyoinc.com/HHResCo.html
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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. The Real WDC Y2K Story
2. Rates
3. Farm Fun
4. Media Outreach
5. CCCC
------- The Real WDC Y2K Story ----------
The usual infestation of c.s.y2k'ers was there early, GregS staked out
executive class seating for us. When the buffet line opened, I made a
beeline for it and was first in line... or so I thought, by the time I
had my plate, I was appalled to see GregS, DD, and the other
c.s.y2k'ers moving through the buffet ... from the back end. The menu,
California wraps, ham, turkey, etc; spinach puff pastry, cut
vegetables, spicy meatballs, fried cheese.
Paloma O'Reily introduced herself and once I realized who she was, I
introduced her to CBNnews. Paloma is the Cassandra Project; CBNnews is
the Christian Broadcasting Network News service and is carried on the
700 club. CBN's Y2K website connects to Cassandra, something that
Cassandra noticed and was surprised by.
I worked the crowd, spoke with a rep from a military Telco, most of his
switches are in good shape, they've run tests and have an upgrade
schedule. Met some incredibly wired people, the density of marketeers
was lower than usual.
I also spoke with Margo Smit of Omroepvereniging KRO, Dutch TV news
that covered Fast Eddie Yardeni's talk. They came with a camera crew
and taped the crowd, For those of you in the Netherlands, GregS, DD,
Jim, and I are near the middle of the audience. GregS is the tall one
holding the combloc AK-47.
---speakers---
Fast Eddie lived up to his name, his talk was fast, funny, his lead joke
was that he's given his stock Y2K speech a bunch of times and lately,
awareness has gotten to the point that his opening remark is, "You guys
in?" Fast Eddie has some terrific threads... thousand dollar suits?
That'd make his rate $500/hour.
Fast Eddie appears to be at 3.5 on the c.s.y2k scale. To me, at 4.0, it
seems that he doesn't quite get it... but there's hope. It explains
why, to milne, Fast Eddie seems like a raving lunatic.
Carmichael has addressed WDC Y2K twice. A year ago and last night,
following Fast Eddie Yardeni.
Carmichael is a white haired, prematurely old'ish looking small boned
person, but then most people look thin to me. He's an old new ager and
talks like a neo-hippie. His talk was full of touchy-feely concepts but
carefully masked in scientific looking graphs and QUADRANT CHARTs.
He's monitoring the awareness and presented a diagram that matches my
experience as a money grabbing consultant. The chart didn't have scales
(touchy feely) but showed 1998, 1999, and 2000 with a mid height wavy
line, the line represents required level of effort (I think of it as my
billings.) There was another line that represented actual level of
effort but he might have called it "meta social Y2K connectivity to
psycho awareness."
Other sound bites: Techno-Fascism, civil strife, things we never thought
of, prep for breakdowns.
Whatever... the line was very low in 1998, rises in mid 1999 and goes
asymtotic at 4Q 1999. I think of it as my billings.
Whatever... he's wrong, it's gonna blow before 4Q 1999. Maybe this
summer, yeah, I'm guessing. ... something wicked this way comes.
Paloma O'Reily - Cassandra Project, spontaneous, grassroots, get the
word out, get involved, get people taking action now. Check out
Cassandra on the web.
John Ivenson - British Computer Society, Y2K Chair, Dept of Trade and
Industry, electronics records, Action 2000, looking at key
infrastructure services, hospitals, power, fuel, supply chain.
Mentioned the UK Y2K training project.
Kathy Kerning - FERC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, CIO. I have
no comments except that GregS walked out shaking his head.
Other meeting comments:
This meeting was more airy-fairy, new-age, we are the world, than
previous ones. There were two hopeful incidents, Jay and I met with a
fellow who is organizing his town in New England along civil defense
lines, he plans to prepare his town and state for power
interruptions, communications outages, and breakdowns in the delivery of
supplies. Not paranoia, not fear but driven by the understanding that
the computer driven infrastructure might fail and that simple measures,
taken now, taken by his entire community will make a difference.
Of course, he's in Rural New England, not New York City.
The second hopeful incident was seeing how serious CBN is on Y2K.
During the Q&A period, CBN asked direct, hard hitting, investigative
reporting questions of the FERC CIO. After the meeting, I spoke
with CBN and their news director shrugged and said, "They couldn't
answer my questions." Christian Broadcasting Network knows more
about national energy issues than the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission CIO? There's something wrong with this picture. Scary...
brrrrr.
So what's the good news about this? CBN has scheduled two 1 hour
specials on Y2K.
July 10th - Y2K and the World
August 7th - Y2K and the Church
Check your local listings, In Washington DC, CBN and the 700 Club are on
channel 20 at 9:00 AM and on the Family Channel at night. These
two shows should help alert the general populace.
I don't know what their show will be like but I've met with them for
a couple hours. They have a solid understanding of the issues and the
metaphor they use is Joseph and the 7 fat years followed by 7 lean
years. Although society is starting late, we have time to fill the
storehouses. They are focussed on local community action and we
discussed the concept of the parish kitchen or larder, local community
effort, churches, volunteers, and neighborhood groups picking up the
ball.
There's a big difference between a denial-head who is in cover-up mode,
someone screaming "we're all doomed", and people who realize that
this is a problem and we can prepare. We should have started years ago
but we still have time.
------------- Rates --------------------
Two rumors from WDC Y2K.
One person reported receiving a 20% raise. This is terrific news. It's
about time that programmers earn their fair share.
There was a report of Geek Raids at a local company. Normally tame
geeks, "they're not that good", who were earning $70K/year are bailing
and getting up to $120K.
I've checked with other local companies and some report confusion on
executive row. One place copped an attitude earlier this year, "If the
geeks want to bail, let them, we'll just hire better ones." Now they're
down to half staff and are starting to wonder what's going on. They
haven't started screaming in terror yet... not yet.
I've seen an internal paper at one client that discusses geek staffing
as a major problem in their future. They identify one of their issues
as having a pool of less than 500 specialists in the entire world
that they can draw upon. Yea! But then, why are my rates so low?
------------- Farm Fun -----------------
The farm is late but the 'shed' is up. We will be adding storage bins,
shelves.
The next big project is rebuilding the pond. A spring feeds a pond,
it's really a mudhole, more suitable for mud-wrestling contests between
milne and koskinen. This summer, a contractor will run a bulldozer
through it to deepen it and build up the bank. We'll have several tens
of thousands of gallons of spring fed water in the pond.
Too much to do. Not enough time.
------------- Media Outreach --------------
Bruce Webster and I got some words in a heavy-duty policy wonk's
magazine this week. This hits the inside of the beltway, they
did a special on Y2K. The cover picture is a series of stone zeros
rolling onto a guy with a PC.
Bruce talks about the poor track record of deploying enterprise scale
software, the short amount of time left, and his stock quote, "The more
I work on this, the more profoundly concerned I am."
Off topic as usual, I ramble about plumbing, management, unlisted
phone numbers, making a nuisance of myself, if you think my comments are
clueless, just wait until congress, the white house, the movers and
shakers of the Potomac try to make sense of my incoherent babbling.
My comments are in the middle of articles entitled:
The Big Glitch - general background on Y2K
Two Views of Y2K
Banks Race the Clock
-cory rambles about enterprise systems software-
Lights Out at Midnight - about the NRC and Nukes
Misplaced Missiles (Ours and Theirs) - about the military's Y2K problems
Medicare's on a Gurney - about Y2K stopping payments
Did Anybody See It Coming - about Social Security
States of Ignorance - about state and local government and Y2K
But Here's a Silver Lining - about how the Lawyers will clean up
The magazine, the June 20, 1998 issue of the National Journal. You
won't find this magazine at your local newstand. You never heard of it?
Well, neither had I. ...there's a reason. It's available by
subscription only and a year (it's a weekly) is $1,047.
I spoke with them for an hour, wore a nice suit... well, my best suit, a
$200.00 off the rack suit that I got at a discount warehouse store....
"compare with $325 at the mall stores.."
------------ CCCC ---------------
Lemme get meta for a moment. The last couple of weeks, there's been a
odd shift in c.s.y2k. The newsgroup has acquired several cranked,
unpleasant, and extremely opinionated persona's. During the last year,
I never resorted to using a killfile... even though my newsreader has an
extremely powerful killfile capability.
I'm reconsidering my policy on kill-filing. Not because I disagree
with certain posters but because they are nasty people and I don't need
to deal with people like that. In some cases, I agree with their
statements... but something like 1-5% of the population has an
anger gene and life is too short to deal with people like that.
I should point out that I don't object to either milne or ney. They
write stuff with an attitude but it's from their heart and it's not
cranked nor is it nasty.
I interpret paul's "flaming death train" comments as shorthand for..
"listen pal, I'm very concerned about the future and have put my money
where my mouth is, the cities won't be safe, take a tip from me and make
some hard decisions to protect you and yours. Here's some information
that may help you understand where I'm coming from."
I can imagine both paul and frank (our 4.75 4.5 guys) laughing, shaking
their heads, saying to themselves, "I've said my piece and I got a
life."
The persona's are angry, mean spirited, argumentative, and I don't need
that. Good luck to them.
Projects - I'm working on some assembly language. I'd like to get
it to the point that I can put up on the web for download. I've
collected a fairly complete toolset, it's unorganized and untested.
I'll be working on this code.
I think we'll be past the denial, awareness, and into full scale panic
by the end of summer.
This morning, CSC, Computer Sciences Corporation, ran an ad on the
Greaseman Show for their IRS Y2K consortium, the members are KPMG, IBM,
Lucent, and Grumman. This is so odd and bizarre. The Greaseman is a
morning DJ who entertains his listeners with stories of sexual
encounters in the back seat of old cars, complete with sound effects of
rev'ing misfiring motors, squeaking springs, and gasps and sighs,
followed by ketchup squirting out of a squeeze bottle. ...which he
calls the moment of Shangri-la.
That's it for this issue. Don't forget to vote.
cory hamasaki 555 days. Edwards: 4 Eastabrook: 3 (a weak 3)