Tom Lawrence

Since then:

We’ve been in a perpetual war in the middle east

Created a fear about a religion based on the actions of some of its extremists

Turned 18, turned 21, turned 24

Lived dreams

Said goodbye to the Concorde

Said hello to Flight of the Concords

Seen an increase in ukulele popularity

Seen bands split and reform

Seen the end of the boy band stronghold, and increase in singer-songwriters

Seen the rise of social networking websites

Been given MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Twitter, Tumblr, Hi5, and more

Been given the gift of video hosting online, including Vimeo, YouTube, and all the porn star equivelents

I guess broadband internet speeds are faster

Were given iPods, iPhones, and other smart phones

Had the first black President

Seen an insanely high roster of celebrity deaths

Watched Disney Stars fall to pieces (see Britney Spears, and maybe that chick from High School Musical who’s nudes were all over the place)

Justin Timberlake

Watched Fame Acadamy, Pop Idol, American Idol and X-Factor run around making a mess

Had the tragedy that is Big Brother

Saw the follow ups to The Matrix and Star Wars Prequels and left feeling molested

Had Lord of the Rings

Learned what alcohol is BAD for you (read: none)

Created new mistakes, and didn’t regret

Listened to Millenium by Robbie Williams fourhundredthousandtimes

And used Last.fm to scrobbl that.

And really, what was the Millenium Bug going to do? Reset all our calendars and clocks to thinking it was the 1900s? Is that the biggest thing we had to fear back then? ‘Oh crap, I’ll have an appointment booked for Tuesday but I’ll be 100 years late for it oh no’.

I can’t believe its nearly 2010, you guys. Seriously, that is insane.

Interesting list, I have yet to type up some posts regarding the year and the decade myself but I’ve reblogged this as a response to your comment on the Millennium bug as it was theoretically a serious issue.

Warning: Geek Out Session Below

Many date systems focused on the last two digits of the year (those being ‘99’ and ‘00’ respectfully). Now, to a human, this is quite obvious that the century has rolled over and we’re now in the year 2000. However, to a computer this meant various things. For example, in the C programming language, the date/time function in the standard library would pass back the value -1900. The problem here is that a HELL of a lot of software out there is programmed in C (including software found in banks) and as a programmer, it would seem obvious to store a year in a variable as an integer - a whole number that can only be positive.

So if a programmer had not inserted code for correct validation and exception handling, this could cause a whole bunch of data catastrophes (ESPECIALLY if we’re talking about banking software) and we’re only talking about ONE programming language here. Any software based on a programming language that focused only on the last two digits could produce any type of result (not just ‘00’ as you would expect), depending on how the language was designed. Even logic systems found in electronics could completely fail with inverted bit patterns, causing many electronic devices to just stop working.

It sounds absolutely stupid in many respects, but it got many programmers worrying about how they had actually implemented date and time into their software and how those systems would cause other elements of their software to react.

Imagine if a nuclear facility’s monitoring software was to crash and perform improper exception handling due to a radiation logging system using two digit dates. It’s something most people didn’t want to know what the result would be.

Thankfully, with funding from various sources into patching and correcting software to either support the use of 4-digit dates or insert the correct validation or exception handling code, there were very few incidents that occurred due to what many claim as the so-called “Y2K bug”. It was somewhat pot luck for most as the majority of programmers just thought to themselves “Shit, exactly HOW did I implement date and time into that piece of software for that particular company? Is that my problem? Should I charge them to correct the program?”.

One good thing to come from the situation is we now know the importance of validation and exception handling for ALL systems in software, even the basic implementations, and storing our year variables as four-digit integers :p

Sorry for the total geek out post there, but it was something I felt the urge to discuss! Hope you enjoyed the read.