On 31 December 1999 I was living in a rented house at Seacliff, not far from the sea near Adelaide. My wife and I were taking a 12-month break from the rigours of living in the Northern Territory. She was doing an afternoon shift at a local hospital and arrived home around 11 pm.
Intending not to miss out on New Year's Eve, we grabbed a couple of bottles of bubbly and walked a few hundred metres to a gazebo high up and overlooking the coastline. There we found a group of half a dozen people all doing the same thing we were doing. We got talking and found them to be good company. We chatted until 12 midnight and then watched the fireworks explode above Glenelg Beach a couple of kilometres away.
After another half hour or so, we walked back home wondering what this new year, 2000 would bring us.
If you are old enough to recall 1999, it was the year the world was tipped to end because computer programs couldn't transition from 1999 to 2000 automatically. Alarmists said there would be rioting in the streets, power systems would fail, airplanes would drop from the sky and dozens of other horrific outcomes.
Needless to say, none of the chaos happened because programmers had been vigilant in updating their software programs to cope with the change. Had they not done so, there would have been some programming challenges, but I'm sure aircraft wouldn't have dropped from the sky or rioting occurred in the street, even in the US.
Life moved on and now it's 2022, a decade later and today we have the climate alarmists telling us the world will flood or get so hot that we'll all melt. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Happy New Year. I hope 2022 is a great year for you.
Robin
