I’m a total idiot. For the past 2 weeks, I forgot to change the
bottom of the two sneak peaks in the “Next Issue” Table at
the bottom of the Transistorized and Tormented series. Please
help me out and e-mail me when this happens. If you’re the first
one to catch me, you’ll win something. I don’t know what yet,
but you’ll win something.
January 1st, 2000 was only half of
our problem.
There are to major aspects of the Y2K bug. The first, was the
1999 -> 2000 roll over. The second, is coming up at the end
of this month. Some of the Real Time Clocks (the things that
keep track of the date in your computer) will not recognize that the
year 2000 is a leap year, and therefore has a February 29th.
It’s pretty much assured that if your computer recognized 1-1-2000
correctly, then it also knows that 2-29-2000 exists. But, in
some cases, it doesn’t work that way. As we all know, computers
are beings of randomness. One would especially know that is true
if he were a technician that worked on computers for a living.
Things happen for an announced, and totally irreverent reason.
But of course, it’s not so irrelevant to the programmer. As we
all know, some bonehead German guy (Don’t me e-mailing me saying I
suck because I make fun of Germans. I am 90% German, and would
be greatly displeased if you did e-mail me.) made a chess game back in
WWII for the nonexistent computer. To save ink and paper, which
was rationed in WWII, he wrote the last two dates of the year instead
of all 4. Things just snowballed from there. (Just think what
will happen in the year 10,000, not only will there be 5 digits to a
date, but there will be 2 leap year days, 2-29 and 2-30.)
Anyway, back to the point. If you stocked up on canned goods and
hand grenades, I wouldn’t throw then out yet. As for the hand
grenades, I’d throw them at that neighbor’s dog that keeps pooing on
your front lawn or wee-weeing on your trees.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying
that 2-29-2000 WILL be a total tragedy, I’m just saying that is has
the capacity to do so, if certain computers fail. Although, to
my knowledge, most Y2k tests done to prepare for 1-1-2000 also tested
for the 2-29 issue. If anyone knows how much the US Government
spent on Y2K testing, could you please e-mail me, and I’ll mention you
in T&T sometime. You’ll probably win the same prize the
person that catches my bone headedness does. If you’re the same
person, we might actually have to get you something of value! 
Won’t that be great?
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