Is it really 2008?? I am now 58 years old, I’ve been retired from my career of over three decades for 13 months, in barely two weeks I’ll celebrate with my wife our 32nd wedding anniversary. You can’t accumulate such longevity in life’s activities without being old, old, old. Social Security actuarial tables suggest I’ll last another 21.5 years if I lasted this long. The same table suggests Marian will live another 29.23 years.
Y2K38 Bug
Should I actually last so long plus 10 years I’ll be entertained by the Y2K38 problem. As opposed to the hyped-up Y2K problem — where I spent New Years Eve 1999/2000 watching Sopranos DVDs with my software engineers at the center waiting for problems as computer clocks ticked over without incident into the year 2000 — this problem in 31 years may turn out to be real.
This problem arises because most C programs use a library of routines called the standard time library . This library establishes a standard 4-byte format for the storage of time values, and also provides a number of functions for converting, displaying and calculating time values.
The standard 4-byte format assumes that the beginning of time is January 1, 1970, at 12:00:00 a.m. This value is 0. Any time/date value is expressed as the number of seconds following that zero value. So the value 919642718 is 919,642,718 seconds past 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1, 1970, which is Sunday, February 21, 1999, at 16:18:38 Pacific time (U.S.). This is a convenient format because if you subtract any two values, what you get is a number of seconds that is the time difference between them. Then you can use other functions in the library to determine how many minutes/hours/days/months/years have passed between the two times.
A signed 4-byte integer has a maximum value of 2,147,483,647, and this is where the Year 2038 problem comes from. The maximum value of time before it rolls over to a negative (and invalid) value is 2,147,483,647, which translates into January 19, 2038. On this date, any C programs that use the standard time library will start to have problems with date calculations.
This problem is somewhat easier to fix than the Y2K problem on mainframes, fortunately. Well-written programs can simply be recompiled with a new version of the library that uses, for example, 8-byte values for the storage format. This is possible because the library encapsulates the whole time activity with its own time types and functions (unlike most mainframe programs, which did not standardize their date formats or calculations). So the Year 2038 problem should not be nearly as hard to fix as the alleged Y2K problem was.
Movie We Saw
Juno. I don’t laugh out loud in many commercial movies but I did here. We went on New Year’s Day to see this movie and just loved it. The trailer is posted below.
It deals with teenage pregnancy but not in any way you would expect. Juno is a very smart 16-year old that finds herself pregnant, going through a momentary impulse to abort the fetus before deciding to allow the baby to be adopted. The movie is chock full of smart, realistic dialogue and real, full-blooded characters. As the movie unfolds the characters reveal more about themselves to the viewer and the truth unfolds to us as it unfolds to Juno. The world is not quite so predictable as she thinks and she is not quite so equipped to interpret complex human interactions as she thinks. Brilliantly done.
The theme sounds like a drag but it is not treated that way. This is a funny, smart, humane, upbeat movie worth the time and money to see.
Naomi Shihab Nye quite adequately invokes the finality of the old year ending and the renewal of the new year — old obligations swept clean — so little is stone.
Burning the Old Year
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
——–Naomi Shihab Nye, “Burning the Old Year” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
A wonderful place where presentation is as important as taste. Not a romantic place, what with its chic, semi-industrial look, but the service is faultless and the food is quite wonderful.
Rapid-fire presentation where she dropped the name of every celebrity we have followed for the past two weeks or so. I couldn’t possibly describe her presentation in any way that begins to truly represent her style. Great fun.
You can see it next to the bird feeder mounted on the tripod.
The transmitter is connected to the wind and rain sensors and their data transmitted wirelessly to the display inside the house. The only problem with the system is that a PC connection requires a serial connection and my laptop doesn’t have a serial port. I bought a serial-to-USB bridge but it doesn’t appear to be working correctly. I’ll keep tinkering with it. But it is way cool.
This weekend we saw 
We thought that 
This movie hit all the right notes from the moment
You would think this would be an unlikely Christmas Day opener but 
