In the western Christian tradition, today is the Feast of the Epihany. In the eastern tradition, it's called Theophany. It marks the day when the three Magi are believed to have visited the baby Jesus.
Last night was Twelfth Night, when we were all meant to take down our Christmas decorations. And next Monday will be Plough Monday, when we are all supposed to get back to work.
Some old friends and I like to spend the daytime on New Year's Eve playing #boardgames in my dad's guest house near the Baltic shore. There's five of us. Tomorrow I'm bringing El Grande, Hansa Teutonica, Heimlich & Co., Saboteur, Love Letter, 6 Nimmt and The Grizzled.
❤️
My wish for everyone is that you and your loved ones,
have a year filled with hope,
fulfilled dreams,
and love,
and that each day ends with
peace
in your mind and heart.
Winter solstice is fast approaching! I know I've discussed traditions with some of you before, but what are your plans for the Solstice, if you celebrate?
Donald #Trump will suffer a medical emergency, and nobody will take it seriously or believe him. His followers will understand his explanation as an encoded sign of something they must do, and do quickly. It'll be chaotic and entertaining, teetering on absolutely dangerous.
We will discover #ChatGPT is fully intelligent, but has a form of dementia that it hallucinated on its own, which is why we get such conflicting output from it already.
#ElonMusk will decide that the name X doesn't sound manly enough, and renames it to XY. As well, his CyberTruck consistently acts more like a submarine than a boat.
China will land a new rover on the #moon to collect all the tardigrades they left behind in the crash.
We will discover (again) that the #Earth only has a single core, but it is #delicious. It'll be described as being like a Tootsypop.
They will resurrect a #Mastodon and it will demand credit on the network. Everyone unanimously agrees.
The #stockmarket will explode. The only problem is nobody has any money left to take advantage of it.
@jerry will get a vacation where he isn't transferring things to a different platform, and the database just works.
The #CommonLisp programming language takes off like never before, and dissenters chant "You can't spell Common Lisp without a C" Lispers will reply, "Thankfully there is no such thing as C++ommon #Lisp then!"
The device /dev/urandom will "flip" and start over again, in a Y2K-style event. Just like Y2K, nobody will notice.
:skull360: Mementomori.social end of the year statistics:
Formed in November 2022, we have grown from 1 user instance to an instance with
153 active monthly users (223 users in total)
Over 46 000 interactions each month
80 669 total posts
2 main languages, English and Finnish
Other statistics:
Most notable users: The Pirate Party of Finland @Piraattipuolue, one of the most known gaming, IT and media related portal and digital news outlet among nerds in Finland @afterdawn, a Finnish videogaming magazine @konsolifin
Technical statistics:
DB size 34.3 GB
Media storage 1.9 TB
Elasticsearch db 3.3 GB
Mastodon version 4.3.0-alpha.0+mementomods-2023-12-16 + Mastodon Bird UI 2.0.0rc
Thank you for being here! Let's rock the 2024! To honor the time spent and next year, I've updated the server banner to a huge hourglass.
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 would like to point out that the Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream that used to be in our freezer was consumed before midnight and therefore NOT subject to any of my New Year's resolutions.
Also, there wasn't that much left in the container and I'd like an exemption waiver for the cinnamon roll I'm about to eat.
“….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?