Farewell, My Decade

Work wise, I agree. End of Tech boom. Start of Tech bomb. I survived 16 layoffs and one Chapter 11 and then sold by a Canada City Company to a Swedish one. Hopefully, it will be better, but I’m not holding my breath.

It’s not all bad. I was “accepted” into Brand W in 2005 and met you guys. Managed to break out of my parent’s orbit and have a tiny place I can call my own. Have a dating life of sorts.

But I still wonder where’s my flying car and jetpack?

Was watching the AMC Three Stooges Marathon and saw an interesting (sort of) ad.

Apparently NewsMax has money to buy airtime to peddle Sarah P’s “world’s bestest bestseller” for a mere 4.97 when you subscribe to RW twaddle.

A whole $4.97!! I think I’d rather love Vince Shlomi’s nuts by spending my money on Slap Chops.

Y2K is still thought of as a big joke… which is kinda unfortunate. The Y2K problem was real, and could have led to disastrous consequences. But it didn’t, and that’s because we took the threat seriously and collectively spent billions of dollars to ensure computer chaos didn’t unfold when the clock struck: 00. I remember one article in which a bank officer described the money they spent to have engineers go through all their ancient code patching it to fix any looming Y2K bugs. He stated: “We wrote the engineers a blank check… and they still went over budget.”

The happy resolution to the impending Y2K crisis is a lesson we should take to heart as a global warming crisis scenario looms over the horizon. Instead, we tend to take the opposite lesson from Y2K: see, it wasn’t such a big deal after all!

@Serolf Divad: Thank you! FSM forbid we should EVER remember that a crisis was averted by incredible efforts and billions of dollars rather than by dumb luck or because it was a “made up” crisis in the first place.

@Serolf Divad: Y2K also led to a brief retro revival of Fortran. Show us your punchcards, America!

I survived the Y2K rollover with a verypregnant Ma Nabisco in Tokyo. My office was so amped with panic they actually cautioned us not to go anywhere near Akihibara lest all the electonics blink out at once.

I celebrated Y2K with a friend visiting from Italy, going from party to party, finally crashing at my (at the time) downtown loft at 4am. I don’t remember feeling very concerned.

Because I knew the issue had pretty much been addressed.

That was before I was fully cognizant of the multitude of crises facing us all, peak oil, Bilderbergers, peak water, vaccines, chemtrails, catastrophic climate change on a scale that seems to accelerate beyond the most pessimistic scientists’ imaginings, fluoride in the water supply, Jesse Ventura hawking conspiracy theories on the cable teevee! I mean, he was a fucking Governer, he must know shit!

The imminent fall of the industrial economy and all that it has benefited me.

Those were good times.