OT Mad old woman syndrome and bird flu

[Gully Foyle]

It must still exist - someone on Grey's Anatomy (it's a US TV program Mary) had it a couple of weeks back IIRC.

[Gully Foyle]

In the year 2000, 70% of the world's code was COBOL.

I'm told it's down below 50% now.

I was coding state of the art COBOL for the financial industry up until about 1990 and got a nice batch of work in 1998-1999 fixing Y2K problems.

The Y2K bug never happened because a lot of people worked a lot of hours to ensure it didn't.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

And chicken pox is doing the rounds at the moment.

[Mary Fisher]

The only strange person I kiss is Spouse. In fact he's the only person I kiss, no-one else is good enough :-) He's protected from infection by his large beard.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

Quite. But perhaps they haven't been mentioned in the press or on telly, which is where most people seem to get their 'intelligence'.

Mary

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah. That would explain it then.

[Bob Eager]

No, it couldn't be fixed. This was the field length embedded in the file system. We had to apply a patch every year or so to move the 'window' where dates were interpreted as 'past' or 'future'.

[mogga]

Agreed. The mainmet heating consumer unit used in communal heating systems broke. T'was in the Manchester Evening news. :)

[Mary Fisher]

Must be true then.

Mary

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember dave saying something like:

Air rifle and good scope. Hours of endless fun.