The Swingin' Swine called a Microsquat techie with this colloquy resulting:

Swine
"... so, if I install Win 98 on top of Win 95, my windows software will
be compliant... right?

MS Techie
"... sssssss... can't understand... ssss... question... sssssss... our
connection seems... ssss... breaking up... sssssssss... *click*"

Get the whole fractal story at MicroSquat Y2K Central

One more thing... major PC hardware manufacturers are now hedging
at loading Win 98 on their systems because it just don't work right.

And this final response from Stavros, the owner of a small Greek restaurant
where Piglet gets his daily gallon fix of rigid caffeine: "Tanks Gott for Cheezus, dats all I can zay. Eez in Gott's hands and dare ain't nuttin' we gonna do
'bout eet. Iffa we dohn havva no foods, denna we dohn havva no foods.
Dat's it. Juss holda on-a-to you butt and kiss it goodbye. Anyway, nuttin
gonna happen. Anyway, whaddya gunna do, right? Life is hard."

Strange... Piglet felt better after hearing that than he did after reading the MS
Y2K compliance page. And it brought us closer to Stavros.

23 July 98
29 Wall Street Firms Pass First Test

NYSE claims 29 brokerages passed their first Y2K date rollover test.
More tests are scheduled for March this year.

The Aerial Oinker was present and accounted for on Waal Street
when the NYSE auto-trades volume threw a monkey wrench in the
trading gears. But they didn't have half the current volume then,
and they weren't dependent upon high volume systems in the current
range of foreign nations then.

Devaluation of Asian currencies came back on us, and still haunts the
Asian nations it targeted. Its entirely possible that Y2K may do the same,
via other nations' systems Y2K outages, and be further complicated by
foreign economies vulnerabilities during their currency recoveries.

22 July 98
Y2K: Sustained Chain Reaction

Periodic and Intermittent Impacts for a Decade

The FAA says *one* of their key mainframe computers is Y2K
compliant. IBM, the system's manufacturer, says they don't
even have the skills or tool to fully test that theory.

Why the variation in stories? Part of it is likely a result of low-end
damage control, public relations and panic-prevention on the part
of the FAA, and a little sales promotion on the part of IBM. But it
gets better: the FAA's mainframe reads "01" as 1975... all the
way to 32... or to 2007, which is the earliest the bits and bytes
will go nuclear.

Seems reasonable to re-engineer the acronym to read "Y2K +/- 10".

Watch the wanted ads blossom with tweaks for programmers/code
writers, and hardware/software installation gurus. Watch budgets
for systems and software (and related law suits for systems failures)
grow parallel. If you follow the potential ripple effect far enough
in that chain of events, the potential overall economic impact
becomes undebatably grave.

13 July 98
Wall Street Y2K Exercise

SIAC runs a two firm, 100-share test buy/sell execution on forced-up
date of 29 December 1999. Results/impact hit the books after the
traditional four-day lapse, and will be announced, plus or minus some
public version spin, on or about Thursday, 16 July. Larger volume,
multiple transaction exercise is expected circa October this year.

OPSEC's wish list of additional Y2K exercise candidates:

All manufacturers of major computer hardware/software components

Notably, to our knowledge, no major PC manufacturers have developed
and made available free Y2K patches even for their pre-fab systems.
In fact, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, Toshiba, et al, are similarly unresponsive
on the subject.

19 JULY 98
Equipment & Tools

Sat TV Links
http://www.minot.ndak.net/~brichard/dss.html

Iridium Sat Cell Phones & Pagers
http://www.iridium.com/

Cordless Tools
http://www.porter-cable.com/
http://www.porter-cable.com/news/bammer.html