New Years Eve 31 December 1999

New Years Eve 99 Pictures

Happy New Year!

New Year's Eve has become a tradition at the O'Cravens. This year was slightly different since it would bring in Y2K. They had put up large sheets of white paper on the wall for everyone to write their resolutions and predictions about the years to come.

Everyone's Predictions

• Computational linguistics will be very important. I'm staking my life on it (and I'm not even Greg Kochanski).
• Despite all this "millennial" stuff + hype, people, will continue to focus on reminiscing over the last 30/1000 years.
• Microsoft will be broken up into Baby-Bills, which will occupy the entire fortune 500 in 10 years.
• Electric cars still won't catch on with the major manufacturers.
• We will travel by boat to NYC & London faster & cheaper than planes.
  D = ½pv²
  p_H2O/p_air = 1000    - I don't think so
• (Century) Bill Gates will be primarily remembered as the greatest philanthropist of the early 21st century. - Jim Butler
• Vast improvements in technology will make small to modest improvements in quality of life - Greg K.
• Next New Year's Eve, at this party, the game with the longest setup time will take 1 hour and 15 min.
• Harvard, on learning Boris Yeltsin is jobless, will offer him a professorship, (Actually they still haven't done it for Gorbachev who is far more statesmanlike) so this makes no sense.
• There will be webcams everywhere (someone may be watching right now!)
• Next new year's eve, this party will have much lower attendance -- and most attendees will be first timers.
• The United States will remain the world's only super power thru the 2030 timeframe.
• We will be remarkably blasé about technological changes over our lifetimes (microwave, computer, etc), but our lives seem little changed by them as a practical matter.
• Fleet Bank and Bank Boston will merge (within a year). IBM will cease to exist as an independent company (within 10 years).
• Engineers will for the 50th century in a row, fail to invent the self cleaning house.
• Mobile phones and baby monitors will merge, allowing everyone to be issued with a wireless number at birth. (Well, everyone middle class)
• Bill Gates will publish his authorized autobiography Geek (anyone got a better title?)
• • Nat will not like his job.
  • C-- will have a new job.
  • Bill will be at his old job.
  
  
• Everyone gets his or her own personal IP address, usable to contact by email, phone, web ... -Jeff F.
• In 2000, some businesses will try to hype the real millennium . . .
• . . . and fail due to "millennial fatigue"
• Unitarian wedding vows adopted as part of uniform commercial code.
• The Dow will reach 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000 11000 11500 12000 before the crash.
• Fusion will still be "sometime in the next 20 years" (and still getting DOE funding!)
• By the time your children reach adolescence, plug-in cerebral software will have replaced tattoos and piercing as the body modifications of choice. Happily for Joel, the first "killer plug" will be a voice-to-text application or mental muscular representation of phonology.
• 1. Microsoft will be more valuable than several small countries (already is!)
  2. Microsoft will buy said countries.
  3. The U.N. will be forced to pay large fees to upgrade them.
  4. They won't work any better.
  
  
• At the last minute before the election, Bill Bradley will be revealed to have participated in a sports betting and game fixing scandal of embarrassing proportions. Meanwhile, Al Gore will be revealed as a major generator of spam mail and endlessly forwarded humor posts. In this decade both Finland and the US will have women presidents. Finland is a no-brainer as 4/5 of the major candidates are women. Ours will result from a Gore/Feinstein ticket followed by the shooting of Gore (cleverly disguised as a hunting accident) by a Microsoft stockholder following the breakup decision on MS. (But Islamic militants will be the first to be blamed.)

Current Y2K bugs found:

• Duffy's computer thought it was Jan 4, 1980 on the first day of the year.
• MediaOne sent us our weekly web page status report that said we had no hits and no throughput.

This web page (http://www.gouldhome.com/NewYearsEve99.html) was last updated on December 31, 1999. For any comments or suggestions about the site contact Daphne Gould. Contents copyright © 1999-2003 by Joel and Daphne Gould.