New Year’s Eve: Musings on Y2K
At 3pm PST on 31 December, 1999, I sat down at the computer in my home office in Yakima, Washington. I logged remotely into the network at HQ and started monitoring our systems. The most critical moment would come at 4pm local time. We were in Pacific Standard Time (PST), -0800 UTC. In other words, at 4pm in Yakima, it would be midnight in Greenwich, England, where the time zone aligns with Coordinated Universal Time. (Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated as UTC, not CUT, because there are actually other languages in the world besides English, and… never mind. Look it up if that story interests you).
Anyway.
The GPS satellites run on UTC, and our entire multi-state operation depended on GPS timing. My first hint of system failure because of a Y2K bug would occur at midnight, UTC.
Beginning at 3:55pm I began testing the major system once a minute. At 4:05pm I sent out the notice to corporate management that all was well.
I tested hourly, then, but the next critical moment wasn’t until 9pm PST, which was when midnight occurred on the US East Coast. Our equipment was all in MST and PST, but some of our many telecom providers might have systems with local time coordination in some other US time zone. (They’d all be using GPS now, but – this was 1999, and US telecommunications had plenty of legacy systems with other clocking methods).
In the end, nothing failed. Our entire system worked.
This wasn’t because Y2K was overblown.
It was because we replaced our billing system, which wasn’t able to generate an invoice after the date flip.
It was because we did software updates on several proprietary systems that would have failed.
It was because we did firmware updates, too.
Equipment inventories.
Application inventories.
Operating system inventories.
Software version inventories.
Firmware version inventories.
The reason January 1, 2000 seemed like such an ordinary day is because of the MASSIVE amount of work and money spent to make it ordinary. There are unsung heroes around the world who put in the work to update or replace systems that would’ve failed otherwise.
If you’re one of those people, I would love to hear your story.
I ended my time on Duolingo in the #NewYear, after finding out they sacked a bunch of translators and are now relying on AI to generate sentences for learning. Essentially, they are just generating the content via AI and having a limited number of translators "check the work" before putting it up into their programs.
I also noticed that, the longer I went on in my Duolingo program, the quality of the learning seemed to decrease dramatically, and after learning about the AI thing, it started to dawn on me that this could be part of the reason for that. But even if it isn't related, the fact that they are making this move toward AI only means in the future, the learning WILL decrease in quality whether we like it or not, and that's no fun at all.
So No Thanks, #Duolingo. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Happy new year - here's a toast to '24 from Viv! 🥂
I've got plans for the Swing Time! webcomic, for this year and beyond - new pages, more page updates, more merch, a debut on Tapas, new rewards and more!
NASA isn’t the only space agency with exciting missions 🚀
A planetary scientist shares the six space missions they are most excited to follow in the #newyear (including Nasa’s mission to send humans around the Moon and back):
Amazigh communities in Morocco welcome their New Year now officially recognized ~ The Amazigh new year has roots in honoring the land, the harvest, and the agrarian cycle. This year Morocco officially celebrates the holiday.
Participants take an ice-cold bath during a ceremony to purify their souls and to pray for the new year at the Teppozu Inari shrine in Tokyo
Participants pray as they take an ice-cold bath during a ceremony to purify their souls and to pray for the new year at the Teppozu Inari shrine in Tokyo, Japan, January 14. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon
“….and there on the edge of this world, ourselves. The wheels revolve, we’ve chosen the road. We have to believe that we know where it goes.”
From On the road by Jenni Daiches
There is never a poem that fits a picture exactly but these lines echoed. I suppose I know where I’m going. I’ve made my choices. Whether they are the right ones, who knows?
Just wrapped up my first week as #ResearchOfficer for #ANU Vice-Chancellor and President Genevieve Bell - and wow am I already learning a lot and meeting some amazing people 😍
First task: get the VC office up-to-date on #women & #leadership. We now have a woman in charge 👏💖💅