What were you doing 15 yrs ago?

[durango dude]

Well - I wish I could say I was enjoying an investment in Generac ----- but they weren't public (same for Kohler).

I lived in Wisconsin - which is where Generac and Kohler. Both companies were booming.

A friend of mine (successful investor) once told me ---- don't buy the product - buy the company.

[lrr]

What would happen now if one of our "enemies" did a major cyber attack that shuts down communications and or the Grid. I don't think we are prepared like we were for Y2K


Tom

For an excellent read, check out One Second After. I converted a basement closet into a "survival closet" after reading the book, and started buying extra items everytime we went shopping. It is not so bad if you do it over a period of time. Instead of buying a couple can of soup, buy 4 or more. Buying rice, beans, sugar, flour? Get some storage containers and get that 20 lb. bag. Transfer smaller amount to normal sized containers to put in the pantry for everyday use, and refill as needed. Get a case of bottled water to store. Buy candles and strike matches. You can spread the purchases out over time and not notice the hit to the pocketbook.

I kept a pocket notebook on the nightstand for a long time. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and add things like dual fuel camp stove, freeze dried food, liquor, more ammo ...

Oh yeah -- the most important thing to put on the list:
Mega (30-36 roll) packages of toilet paper. Things will get crazy when people cannot get food. Things will get insanely dangerous when the supply of TP runs out.

[leehljp]

For an excellent read, check out One Second After. I converted a basement closet into a "survival closet" after reading the book, and started buying extra items everytime we went shopping. It is not so bad if you do it over a period of time. Instead of buying a couple can of soup, buy 4 or more. Buying rice, beans, sugar, flour? Get some storage containers and get that 20 lb. bag. Transfer smaller amount to normal sized containers to put in the pantry for everyday use, and refill as needed. Get a case of bottled water to store. Buy candles and strike matches. You can spread the purchases out over time and not notice the hit to the pocketbook.

I kept a pocket notebook on the nightstand for a long time. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and add things like dual fuel camp stove, freeze dried food, liquor, more ammo ...

Oh yeah -- the most important thing to put on the list:
Mega (30-36 roll) packages of toilet paper. Things will get crazy when people cannot get food. Things will get insanely dangerous when the supply of TP runs out.

Sounds somewhat like our "earthquake" boxes (3 days to a couple of weeks supplies) that we had in Japan. We were in the '95 Kobe quake and 20 miles for the epicenter. LOML took the "survival" boxes seriously after that. We also learned that pet bottle water doesn't last as long as one would think before tasting stale. Rotating edible supplies becomes a necessary habit.

The one item that was the absolutely most helpful for us - a 50cc scooter. (we had 2) While we were not in the seriously damaged area, I was able to get into and out of the center of the damage to haul water and immediate supplies to a couple of families. I was able to take short cuts that automobiles couldn't. I put a lot of miles (kilometers) on that scooter over a couple of weeks. I could go to where supplies were and haul in small amounts quickly.

[capncarl]

Leehljp, I haven not seen the small scooter on anyone's disaster list, that is a great idea. It would run a long time on the gas already on hand. It gets a lot better mileage than a 4 wheeler, I wouldn't make it to town and back on a tank of gas in mine.

Does anyone know the shelf lif of the pre mixed canned gas they sell in quart cans for weed eaters and chain saws? Great stuff, might be a storable item in the survival pack.

I've been through floods, hurricanes and tornados and the general public attitude was great, everyone bonded together to pull through it. I'm not sure what the public attitude would be in a manmade disaster of unknown sources. I'd sure have second thoughts about knocking on someone's door to see if they were ok like we did during our last flood.

[JoeyGee]

Interesting thread indeed. To the original post question, I was (and still am) working at a natural gas utility. After 2 years of prep, we were required to be onsite. I think it was 6 p.m. until 2 a.m. We had to e-mail reports every 15 minutes and call into a conference call every hour, I think. No issues reported, of course.

[JSUPreston]

I was the sysadmin for an accounting firm here in town. We set up a parallel network and performed testing on every piece of software and hardware we owned. Lots of legacy/DOS based apps (included apps ported from an old System 36) were replaced. We were prepared....

...until we got a fax on Dec. 31 at about 3:00pm. A vendor had found a bug in one module of a piece of software that only 1 person in the building used, and she had forgotten to test it. They promised a fix in two weeks. Problem was, that person had to start using the module on Jan. 3! IIRC, she burned a lot of midnight oil catching up once the patch was installed.

We did have a "funny" moment. We shut down and unplugged all the servers and network equipment from the mains after 11:00 pm. At about 12:15 am, we plugged everything up and powered up. No issues, except our main KVM wasn't working. Idiot that was working with me forgot to plug it in and was swearing it was a Y2K problem. Then again, he wanted to go get plastered and was a little distracted.

[twistsol]

I was a consultant working for a frozen food company at the time. We did some testing on their largest robot run cold storage facility. Disconnected the robots so they couldn't execute any of the commands. Once we rolled the date on the test system, the computer thought everything in the warehouse was expired and would have emptied the place in about 8 hours had the robots still been online.

It wasn't all hype, though there was a fair share of that. We did a lot of work to prevent the issues the media said would be imminent, and missed a few but nothing major. IT folks, especially Cobol programmers in the last half of the 90s made a lot of money. IT work disappeared for a few years after that since everyone had been spending like crazy on IT projects.

[JSUPreston]

It wasn't all hype, though there was a fair share of that. We did a lot of work to prevent the issues the media said would be imminent, and missed a few but nothing major. IT folks, especially Cobol programmers in the last half of the 90s made a lot of money. IT work disappeared for a few years after that since everyone had been spending like crazy on IT projects.

Yep, a lot of work by those of us in the field made it look like nothing serious. Had I really known and understood the Y2K thing fully early in the 90's, I would have learned COBOL. I had people asking me if I knew it for side jobs.

Ironically, I learned a little COBOL around 2002-2003 when I was helping convert a mainframe based system to VB and SQL.