Sunday, July 13, 2003

 

Happy Birthday To ME! Yes, to ME!
Here it is, the anniversary of my birth. I was born at 1030 Central time in the city of Chicago, Illinois at Saint Veronica's. I currently live in the Pacific time zone, so the true time of my birth was at 0830 by my local clock. I was 7 or 8 weeks early and my mother was prepared for any problems which might arise. Sure enough, problems came up. According to my mother and father, I spent the first few weeks of my life in an incubator since I could not control my own body temperature. But then things got better and my parents brought me home and here I am today, 55 years later. I have a countdown clock which can be set to a specific time on any day and I watched it count all the way to zero. At zero hour, 0830 local Pacific time, I celebrated the moment with a toast to myself with my cup of coffee for surviving this long without serious difficulties, and then, I went back to watching CBS News Sunday Morning and continued my life just like any other Sunday morning. During the next commercial break, I reset the clock for next year and put it back on the shelf alongside the other clocks counting down to various dates and times and refilled my coffee cup. Originally, these clocks were for counting down to the year 2000, and all but one of them has a front indicating it is counting down to the year 2000. Maybe one day, I will cover over all of them with they really are counting down to, like the one which has a bit over 3600 days which is when I turn 65 and can officially retire and finally get a break on taxes because of my age. What a bust Y2K was! All the hype about disaster and then a big nothing when the time came and the clocks rolled over to the new year. I was one of those computer programmers who built systems in the early 80's when memory was expensive and you had to count every byte used for a program or for data storage. I admit, I used 2 digits for the year, but I built into the program a "window" so it adjusted the year displayed. Every year had 1900 added to it. If the stored value was less than 70, it added 1 more. I made it so a 2 digit year would work from 1970 through 2070. At the time I did this, it just seemed the logical thing to do. My supervisor thought I was wasting my time to add the few extra program steps required to add 1 based on less than 70. He thought I was doing extra work for nothing and wasting time. Right, I wasted my time. When the year rolled over, NONE of the programs I wrote broke because of the Y2K rollover! So anyway, it is my birthday today, and I am happy about it, and I am happy to be here, still, yet... Time sure flies when you're having fun!

Posted by: Rowlfe - at: 7/13/2003 11:40:00 AM

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