Cory Hamasaki's DC Y2K Weather Report V2, # 34
"August 17, 1998 - 500 days to go." WRP90
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
Don't forget, the Y2K chat-line: http://www.ntplx.net/~rgearity
any evening, 8-10PM EST.
--------------------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. Y2K minus 500
2. Y2K not a big deal
3. Y2K and you.
4. What's going to happen
5. What can you do
6. Team starting up
7. SHARE/GUIDE
8. CCCC
------------- Y2K minus 500 ---------
What does it mean... We're outa time for triage and the contingencies
that would keep a semblence of the infrastructure running.
The work has not been done. There is not enough time left to engineer
and deploy emergency systems, to rip out the complex systems and replace
them with 90% accurate, close enough for government work, simpler
systems.
This is what I believe... a few large corporations will complete their
remediation work, a few essential systems will be 100% compliant, some
cities and towns will manage to function nearly normally.
I don't believe that any government agency including the SSA will be 100
percent operational. There will be failures and confusion everywhere.
However... B52's will still fly. Most of the Navy will be
operational... sure, some of ship's administrative computers will fail
but a good porkchop knows how to bypass the system anyway.
In the old days, you had your checking account and your savings account.
It was simple.
Today, you have interest checking with overdraft protection, direct
deposit, debit cards, 128 bit electronic banking, ATMs, automatic bill
payment, minimum balance for no service charge, and dozens of other
complexities that are not necessary. All this takes code, lots of code.
Up to day 500 there was a chance to return banking to its simpler roots.
It didn't happen, there isn't enough time to consider this alternative
and to implement simple, Y2K-safe banking.
It doesn't matter if it is still possible for a bank to actually create
a simpler way... the previous two paragraphs are examples of
hypothetical triage, contingencies that should have been planned for all
industries.
It didn't happen...
What did happen is the FAA falsified their Y2K posture... they were
caught by both the GAO and the DOT's Inspector General. But the FAA is
not the enemy... they are just a convenient example, a fable for our
times. Clueless management, pomposity and arrogance raging in the
halls, their Y2K TSAR declares himself to have a PhD from the school of
hard knocks. Unsubstantiable success stories...
This happy talk is happening across the board, in industry, in
government, in the utilities. No one has owned up to their problems...
we seen a few shills issuing platitudes, a few statements that NOBODY
PANIC. When I hear the screams, NOBODY PANIC, I start looking for
someone to knock down so I can get to the exit before them.
So what does this mean to you... and me, and your mom...
It means you're on your own, you've been abandoned by the corporations
and the government. They're not going to do it for you. You have to
take action for yourself... and you have 500 days to do it... less
if you expect failures to begin in January 1999 due to the Jo Anne
Effect. The Jo Anne Effect...
It's odd that the breakthoughs of Y2K understanding have come from the
grassroots movement in c.s.y2k, tm_year, SVC-11, Time Dilation, RAILINC,
Rick Cowles' book, cash on hand, grain, water, solar for everyman... and
now the Jo Anne Effect, the understanding that accounting systems will
start probing the wall at 2000 in January 1999, some might start
earlier... That systems that sort transactions into last year, this
year, and next year must know about 2000 in 135 days.
We're outa time, what do you do?
The first thing you do is ... buy my book... just kidding, I did start
to write a personal survival text for Y2K but probably won't complete
that project.
The first thing is decide on your strategy for six month survival and
forever.
You can ride out a three month failure using stored provisions... and if
we're just talking food, it's only a few hundred dollars. Boil water or
Clorox it. Install Solar panels or a generator. Have some cash on
hand, some? Try thousands of dollars. You don't want to be in East St.
Louis, Miami, South Chicago, or living in Central Park... you know your
area. You know where it's safe and where it isn't.
Beyond six months, you must be self-sustaining. This doesn't mean
producing absolutely everything yourself. It means having
collapse-proof money, silver perhaps. Having a means to produce food or
items and skills that can be traded for essentials.
The more you strive for a comfortable and guarenteed safe life, the
greater the cost. For example, my forever scenario is living in a shed
65 miles outside of DC. It'll be cold in the winter, hot in the summer
and the water has to be hauled in from the spring. It means living on
beans and rice mostly, then shifting to corn, squash, and beans. But it
won't take a lot of cash because my expectations are modest.
Security at the farm isn't a Springfield Armory M1A and a couple other
assault rifles. Security comes from the fact that the farm is miles off
the state road, up a county road, and then a mile of gravel road that
snakes through another farmer's corn field. Oh and we'll cut the road
with the frontloader.
I'm not planning on firefights but my pal is a gun-nut and has a
typical gun-nut's armory... he's not the one with the Holland and
Holland shotguns though, that's another gun-nut.
The day 500 message is, they didn't do their job. Get ready. Get ready
for 3, 6 months or forever. milne, ney, and others are preparing for
forever... if that is too much, remember, this too will pass.
If you had five double eagles, two sets of clothing, good boots, a
cooking kit, a knife, a canvas tarp, an AR-15 and 100 rounds of SS109,
you'd be wealthier that 99 percent of the people in the world.
If you had a 5 acre spread in the boonies, a well, a two room shack, a
wood stove, Clorox, liquid detergent, a 10 watt solar system, an SSB/CW
transceiver, a shovel, axe, seeds, you could live better than any
ancient king.
---- Y2K not a big deal, can be solved! -----------
You've read the exhortations from Peter deJager, stay the course, code
fellas, we can do it. There have been confident statements that this
firm (unnamed) is doing well or that person (unnamed) works somewhere
that's in fine shape. This counters the rumors that this firm (also
unnamed) is toast or that person (unnamed) sees a train wreck in their
future. Or does it?
Let's take a dispassionate look at this. If a firm is doing so well, why
not announce that to the world? I'm feeling goooooood today, I lost a
bunch of weight, found a twenty dollar bill, the minoxidil is working,
and geekettes find me irresistable.
On the other hand, if the Viagra isn't helping, the athelete's foot has
spread to my 'recreational body parts', well, would I be running ads to
that effect in the Wall Street Journal?
..or would I impose a news blackout and the only way you'd find out about
it ... pssssst, don't use my name but the fat geek has this skin
condition... I heard it from my barber who heard it from his
dermatologist.
Everytime we hear good news and an independent review is made, it turns
out that someone is wishing real hard. What about the situations where
there isn't an independent review?
This doesn't mean that some firms aren't getting the job done. At the
last WDC Y2K, the Y2K VP's from three corporations presented their
firm's Y2K posture and lessons learned. These were: Fidelity Investments,
Marriot, and Fannie Mae. They've been pressing hard, spending the bucks.
and they're not done yet.
Will they make it? Probably. Will they have problems? Absolutely but
the problems should be solvable since they've been pressing hard for
years. But what does this mean about all the other corporations in the
world? ... Well, BankBoston will probably make it.... same with USAA.
What about the others, the ones who haven't come clean? What does the
absence of proof mean? Is this good news or bad? Does this mean it can
be solved or that the wishful thinking goes on a little longer?
..And yes, even if BankBoston makes it, if all their trading partners
fail, they fail too.
--------- Y2K and you -------------
The question is, what about you. At 500, it's time to decide for
yourself. Has the government, utilities, transportation, finance,
manufacturing, communications proved to you, beyond a reasonable doubt,
to a moral certainty, that they have things under control, that they are
on track, and if not, contingencies and backups are defined, in place,
and tested?
Have they done this, do you have evidence that a reasonable man would
accept or are you being asked to 'trust me' but you don't really know
who you're being asked to trust.
What happens if it's worse than their guesses? Who loses and what do
they lose? What is at stake? Are we talking about paying $1.98/gallon
for unleaded or slogging over the Shennadoah mountains in mid-winter to
escape the ragtag army of Free Delaware. ...as they sweep west on
another campaign to subdue and loot Appalachia. Darn, only 27 rounds of
5.56 left... make each shot count.
Do you feel lucky today? Well... do you?
--------- What's going to happen? --------
Here's my guess. I'm writing it at 1:30 AM, the house is quiet and the
night outside is dark. The systems will begin to fail within 150 days,
not the trivial predictive systems that have been exhibiting problems
for the last year, the critical systems that drive electronic commerce,
the complex sets of code that move the information that causes food,
fuel, materials, goods to be scheduled, allocated, placed where they're
needed, when needed.
Most of these failures will not be life critical, DKNY delivers an
excess of size 16 outfits, a shortage of Fruit Loops develops, a VTAM
outage causes a 45 day delay in the release of the new Puff Daddy CD.
Doesn't matter... or does it? Does it cause DKNY to bid up the rates
for DB2 programmers and hire SQLealers who would have been completing
the Y2K remediation at the Federal Reserve? Does Kellogs engage Mobil
Oil in an open war for geeks?
I'm guessing that it will start in January 1999, the failures and crisis
will become more and more evident throughout the year. The grit will
be tossed into the machinery and it will become worse and worse through
1999. 2000 will be a mess and just as the systems seem to settle down,
1Q2001 will produce a new wave of problems as the systems that look back
and report on the previous year, are run for the first time with
zero-zero data.
But you know that. What does it mean to you? Well, it depends. I'm
guessing that most people will be able to ride this out in suburbia or a
medium sized city... but know that this is a guess. Know that I am an
optimist. There is no reason to believe that we won't see a complete
collapse of civilization. Anyone who says that things will be fine
hasn't got a good sense of history or current events.
History - In the 1970's, I went to Guatemala... it's been in the news
lately, tourists and students killed, robbed, and raped. There's some
kind of civil war going on. Here's the real story, Guatemala is a
beautiful land, the people I met were honest, hardworking. The country
is rich in natural resources, the climate is pleasant, it reminded me of
Hawaii. But something's wrong there and it's not the first time.
I visited Tikal, you've seen it. The jungle planet at the end of Star
Wars, the target of the Death Star, was filmed at Tikal. Tikal was an
ancient city state, the focus of a florishing Central American
civilization; I've seen the carvings, climbed to the top of the Temple
of the Giant Jaguar, put my hand on the stellae, the lentals, seen the
glyphs. One day, something went wrong, and the civilization at Tikal
ended.
On that trip to Guatemala, I toured the capital, took my early morning
walks, bought my trinkets and enjoyed a land that had the best that
nature has to offer. But for the last 20 years, most of the news has
been about bandits, rebels, murder. For 20 years, something has been
wrong in Guatemala.
Current Events - Last week a bomb exploded in Northern Ireland.
Protestants and Catholics... this is especially confusing for Americans;
to us, those Protestants are indistinguishable from from Catholics.
What do they think of our AME, Envangelical, Charismatic, Spirit filled,
Southern Baptist churches... not to mention the cross over to Voudoun
that sometimes happens ... but maybe we'd better not get into that. Last
week, something went wrong in Northern Ireland.
What will it be like? A collapse and depopulation as in Tikal? 20
years of low intensity conflict as in Guatemala? Northern Ireland?
I don't know... but you might want to research SO/LIC, Special
Operations/Low Intensity Conflict. This could be part of our new world
order.
----------- What can you do? -----------
The first thing is, don't be part of the problem. Prepare to go
off-grid for three months, food, heat, light, water. Last week we spoke
with people who live in Florida. After a hurricane came through, they
were without power and other services for 6 months. There was one phone
in their community and people were assigned a date and time when they
could make their 10 minute phone call. They never want to experience
anything like that again. They now have months of food, water, and fuel
for their generators (plural) stockpiled. Oh... and remember, that
hurricane did not go though Chicago, New York, Pittsburg, Yokohama,
Melbourne or Athens. It just went though a part of Florida and it took
6 months to restore services.
Once you solve the three month problem. Increase your inventory.
Do you have a plan to work within your community? Do you know who will
need your help most, who has a heart problem, who needs special care,
what would you like to be able to do, when it happens.
While making those preparations... keep telling yourself that it may not
be necessary, that you're just doing your duty for civil emergency and
you really expect the problem to last for a few days, a couple weeks, at
most... While you are doing all this, make some plans for serious
problems.
If you have to abandon ship, if you have to run for it, where will you
run to? Do you have a family farm, hunting cabin, or vacation home?
Are there supplies prestaged there? Supplies sealed in 6 gallon
gasketed plastic bins. Do you have 500 rounds of .22LR and an AR7 in
plastic drain pipe and buried in the back yard? What about medicine,
fuel, matches, knives, tools, clothing, batteries. The list is endless,
cover the essentials first.
What can you do to help rebuild? Not because someone said you should...
but because you'd like to live in a functional world.
If you're going to be part of the solution, the first thing is, don't be
part of the problem. Don't be one of those standing in line for the
scarce Federal handouts, swiping the Solar panels that the highway
department puts alongside the road to power their emergency call phones;
buying your supplies too late, if you do it now, they have time to
produce more.
And don't give up because the job seems too big, because no one seems to
believe you, because you're afraid, because your brother-in-law, the
know-it-all who runs his mouth at family gatherings, points at his ear
and makes circular motions. He's wrong, he'll find out. This is not a
matter of faith.
Start with your Bug Out Bag. It's just a spare set of clothes, some
money, food, a flashlight, maybe a sewing kit, a pocket knife, a P38,
important addresses, a pen and paper, what you might need in a sudden
emergency. You should be able to stock it without spending a penny.
Similarly with your house and 3-6 months store of supplies. You
should have those items anyway. If you are buying non-perishables on
sale, building an inventory will save money in the long run. If you
make spagetti once a week, purchase caselots at a warehouse, it's
cheaper that way.
But the most important part of this is to work with others; you can be a
lone eccentric, hiding in the woods, jumping at every sound or you can
work within your community, support your city's civil emergency program,
help with neighborhood watch, help identify potential problems and
work for solutions.
--------- Team starting up out west -----------
Last week, I received a series of emails from a worried guy. Later I
received an email from his pal and I realized that they are in pretty
good shape. They're not in a major Northeastern city. With two of
them, they have a much better chance. They have time to put plans into
motion. They have the nucleus of a team.
This is not about spending big bucks, this is about intelligent
preparations, and working with others.
You need someone you trust at your back, someone to keep watch while you
rest... this will not be like anything we've ever seen before. This is
a discontinuity in time, a peak event, a shift in reality and all of a
sudden, at a minute after December 31, 1999 23:59PM, the rules change.
Even if Y2K didn't take down the computers, there will be unexpected and
disturbing events. The wine and champaigne producers are expecting to
be sold out months before Y2K... stock up now, they say. If a
significantly larger than normal percentage of the population will be
drunk, what happens...
---------- SHARE/Guide --------------------
Tuesday, I spent 4 hours with IBM S/390 and Fundamental Software at the
Technical Support Conference in Washington DC. IBM had their new, soon
to be announced P390E, a 7.5 MIPS desktop mainframe, on display. The
previous version was about 3 MIPS, my OPEN/370 is a 2 MIPS box, an IBM
3083 the FAA's old machine is a 5 MIPS water cooled mainframe. The
P390E had both parallel channels and multiple ESCON channels. Ah IBM,
heavy on the IO.
At one point, IBM S/390 and Fundamental Software were discussing
technical issues of small mainframes and I was fortunate to be able to
listen in.
The IBM S/390 people included a person who had been working on small
S/370's for 17 years and was part of the XT/370 engineering team. They
discussed weaknesses of the Unix file system, IBM's ESCON, DASD
optimization, bus issues bandwidth, MVS licensing... both the P390E and
the Fundamental Software two cpu box qualify for Entry Systems
Licensing, a one time, very heavily discounted purchase price for
OS/390.
Fundamental Software was running OS/390 in a battery powered notebook
and on an experimental quad box (an unbranded Intel manufactured
engineering reference machine with 4 not yet available Pentium-Pro 400
mHz CPUs.) The quad box was running two instantiations of OS/390. FSI
whispered that they bench the quad box at a group 35.
They have software emulated CTCA and can transmit channel data across
the internet for S/390 distributed operations.
I spoke with and got literature from several Y2K product vendors. My
sense of it was, the Y2K product business is not doing well.
I didn't meet any c.s.y2k'ers but I did talk to one
bit.listserv.ibm-main person. I got more partial solutions to my
3330-11 problem.
------------- CCCC -----------------
Don't forget the realaudio broadcast from http://www.yardeni.com
NOVA Y2K meets Wednesday Aug 18th, check with Jay Goltier.
This Day 500 special WRP has lots of clueless comments from cory. About
all I can add is an apology to the newsgroup and my readers...
What for? I don't know but I'm sure I've offended someone... well,
actually, the point of these writings is to offend and cause people to
question their assumptions, to jar them out of their comfort zone and
stand up for themselves.
Unfortunately, sometimes I get carried away and lean on people too much,
so if I've offended anyone, I apologize... Of course, if I haven't
offended you, well, I'll try harder to needle you next time. With 500
days left, we don't have time to snooze...
cory hamasaki 500 days, 12,000 hours, 135 days until the Jo Anne Effect.