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The scene is Sunday, New Year's Eve, December 31, 2000. Bea and I decided to have a quiet Eve at home. I had a new Merlot, and although Bea had a glass with dinner, I finished off the rest of the bottle...when the pager alarm sounded sometime around 10:30. I struggled with the event for an hour or so, Ms=8.5 on Mindanao, Phillipine Islands, and then prepared and sent out a press release. Everyone is well aware of the problems we've had with the existing "qwhere -t". My dateline read "Thursday, December 31, 1900". I was quite proud of myself, in my current condition, to catch and change the "1900" to "2000" before I sent it out. Then I received the following message from Tom:
Hi Rick - maybe you want to correct:
"... which occured at 10:57 PM local time, Thursday December 31,"
to Sunday?
Hope you had a great holiday.
Tom...
Not to be outdone, I then sent the following message back to Tom:
Tom,
Considering the fact that I started working on that event a few minutes
before midnight on New Year's Eve, after finishing off a fine bottle of
merlot, I think I did fairly well. Of course it would be the one time
in about a year that I mailed to "teleseism" which goes to almost
everyone and their brother. When I discovered the mistake a few minutes
later I decided that most people would be able to work it out for
themselves, and also strengthened my resolve to get Lind to look at
our "qwhere -t" program function and see if she can squelch its Y2K
problem (which Steve never could). (The original date was Thursday,
December 31, 1900). We need a program which we can run when "mainly
drunk" and still get good results!
-Rick
To which Tom replied with a story that I had never heard before:
Good story! I was in the same boat for the (1969?) Santa Rosa earthquake, but half of the party came with me to the Seismo Station - and I couldn't keep them off the phones.
Tom...
We need a program which we can run when "mainly drunk" and still get good results!
| Tom McEvilly | |||
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