A Request By Mike Cherry of CenturyCorp.

greenspun.com : LUSENET : TimeBomb 2000 (Y2000) : One Thread

Greetings, As some of you may know, I'm a police Lieutenant in Bergen County, NJ who has been active in emergency management for the past several years, and Y2K for the past 15 months. This evening, around 630pm Eastern, I received a call from Mike Cherry, of Century Corp. I met Mr. Cherry at the beginning of the year, and have had cause to have numerous meetings, meals, and discussions with him concerning Y2K and embedded chips with RTCC (Real time clock calenders.)

Mr. Cherry has asked me to post the following idea on this forum, as well as others; in the hope that word goes out to TPTB in charge of electric generation companies to include fossil, nuclear, hydroelectric etc. Please bear with me here, as I'm doing this from memory, and I am a cop.....the ideas are Mike Cherry's and the words are mine...

Whereas electricity is the most vital link to a stable infrastructure to include stable & safe operation of nuclear power plants,

AND

no state, nevermind country can exist in a modern world without electricity, and electric power generation is the basis of most other power generation (gas, fuel oil etc.) it is a simple fact that the country cannot risk all possible scenarios-- loss of electric power, loss of gas, water, sewarge;loss of financial and business applications, loss of all other items due to bad code or RTCC embedded chips all AT THE SAME TIME...

Mr. Cherry has suggested that ALL electric plants, based on whatever raw materials, be it nuclear or fossil fuels, redirect their internal clocks individually to a "neutral time" (Mr. Cherry WAS NOT SPECIFIC, I assume it depends upon each utility as part of proprietary software/firmware.) so that the electric industry itself does not immediately fall trouble to the same possible faults that other industries may (NOT WILL) face at the same time.

Mr. Cherry mentioned that this "time change" would have been done in any sort of reasonable testing, so it should NOT be an unreasonable procedure.

Mr. Cherry asked me to post this remark on the forums I frequent because: 1. He does not read the same forums, and

2. In the hope that some high level executive / owner of an electric production facility takes this to heart.

ANYONE in the electric / power industry who is interested in exploring this scenario for testing is requested to email Mike Cherry at Century Corp.

MichaelCherry@centurycorp.com

PLEASE, NO SPAM, QUESTIONS FROM THE PUBLIC ETC.TO Mr. CHERRY, me, you can flame...

BTW, Mr. Cherry also wishes to state for the record that he IS NOT "Mr. CEO" and hadn't heard of Jim Lord.

My email is real...God help me....

-- RJ (LtPita@aol.com), December 23, 1999

Answers

RJ,

I wish Mr. Cherry's idea could work. I, like you, am not a techie, but my common sense tells me that because resetting my PC "internal clock" to a neutral date is not a Y2K fix, then resetting an "internal clock" at each power plant as well is not a quick fix. Understand that resetting a main clock will not magically reset all the milions of clocks on every embedded chip in that plant anymore than resetting my Windows clock will magically reflash my BIOS.

-- Hokie (nn@va.com), December 23, 1999.


RJ: it don't work that way son. If this was plausible, they could all simply set their clocks back 10 years and we'd home free, as Dan Quayle suggested a couple years ago.

Y2K is a systemic problem and the world will hit the wall in 8 more days.

-- a (a@a.a), December 23, 1999.


Ladies & Gentlemen,

I know next to squat about computers, at least when it comes to mainframes and embedded systems. I'm just the messenger, and I would assume Mr. Cherry knows far more than I. The conversation lasted about 5 minutes, so I'm SURE that there are details that flew over my head. I am sorry if I did not get the entire story, but I DID TRY.

-- RJ (Lt{ita@aol.com), December 23, 1999.


Can someone verify that there is a police Lieutenant RJ Pita in Bergen County, NJ? Michael Cherry seems like a very unlikely person to make this suggestion, or to ask someone to post it on internet bulletin boards for him.

-- (RUOK@yesiam.com), December 23, 1999.

Ladies & Gentlemen,

I posted the above post at the Hyatt web site also, so before you jump on me, the procedure was apparently NOT to set the stations to the year "1972" (I had asked about that in the phone call, and Mr. Cherry mentioned that's not what he meant for another whole set of problems.) This will be my last post on the matter because if I say anything else I'll look like a bigger "maroon" than I am...

You may flame when ready...

-- RJ (LtPita@aol.com), December 23, 1999.



As editor of Days to Go, a Y2K online newsletter, I can vouch for the fact that "RJ" using the screen name LtPita@aol.com is a legitimate police lieutenant in Bergen County, active in emergency management and well-researched in basic Y2K issues. This is a valid post, folks. I have spoken with him in the past, and I have spoken with his boss. I have also received information from his police department.

-- Oxsys (Oxsys@aol.com), December 23, 1999.

One other thing, people:

My name is NOT PITA, that is an acronym for Pain in The @$$, a name given to me by my beloved subordinates.

My NAME is

Lt. R.J. Orso Fort Lee (Bergen County) Police 1325 Inwood Terrace Fort Lee, NJ 07024

And no, I'm NOT working now, I've been out on sick leave since October when I had a double spinal operation.

BTW, there are 72 different law enforcement agencies in Bergen County, so NO WAY anyone would have heard of "LtPita"

-- RJ (LtPita@aol.com), December 23, 1999.


I'll use the email provided as a means of providing Mr. Cherry with the URL for this site.

Certainly the man is capable of posting a suggestion here himself. He could even cut and paste from a single document (e.g. "word") to the various forums.

I find it difficult to believe that Mr. Cherry has no better avenues for disseminating such information. Nonetheless, the email shall be sent.

-- Me (me@me.me), December 23, 1999.


sorry pita, hope the back's feelin better...as a goalie, i understand your pain...

Llama

-- Bernard (Llama man@cool.net), December 23, 1999.


I believe if you are at all informed about who Mr. Cherry is, you will already know that he has excellent channels through which he can disseminate information.

However,he also has a great deal of trust in the competence of "RJ" to disseminate information in his own way. Time is short. Can we focus on solutions?

-- Oxsys (Oxsys@aol.com), December 23, 1999.



For those that haven't read Mr Cherry's contribution to the NIST document here is the link.

 Embedded Systems and the Year 2000 Problem

-- Brian (imager@home.com), December 23, 1999.


My power company stated in a bill insert that they have set the clocks in their systems in their power generation plants to the year 2027 and will set them back next spring. This should work because 2027 has the same calendar as 1999 and 2028 the same as 2000 (same calendar meaning leap year vs. non-leap year and day-of-week vs. month-and-date). And of course this avoids the 99-to-00 rollover. Waiting til spring gets past the Feb 29 problem, and if something goes wrong during the clock set-back power consumption will be low and the effects will be less severe than a power failure during bad weather.

This seems like a reasonable approach to me, unless someone knowledgable on the subject of power generation can explain why it won't work. I expect that power generation may use day-of-week and month-and-day to predict consumption. As far as putting expiration dates in equipment, if the embedded system stores the date as a 2- digit year, then 00 is before 99 so anything that has an expiration date in 00 would have already failed. Can't imagine any control process that would divide by the year as some have suggested.

Now if there is some embedded processor that will fail on the rollover and they missed it in their clock adjustment program, then I guess I could have a problem. While I acknowledge the possibility of power failures I think the odds are small. I think it's more likely that I would lose power due to an actual 3-day storm than any likelyhood of failure due to Koskinen's 3-day storm.

Mikey2k

-- Mikey2k (mikey2k@he.wont.eat.it), December 23, 1999.


SYSOPS:

Please delete this thread after 48 hours. I agreed to post for Mr. Cherry, but I don't feel comfortable with my name/address in worldwide view. I believe 48 hours was a reasonable accomodation to Mr. Cherry. Thank you.

-- RJ (LtPita@aol.com), December 24, 1999.


Setting the clocks back ,ight work in certain situations. A Miami Herald article appearing a few weeks ago indicated that the Broward County water treatment plant clock had been set back to 1972. Also, FPL has set some of their power plant clocks forward .

-- George (florida1018@yahoo.com), December 24, 1999.

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