This memo is to announce the development of a new software system which will be Year 2000 compliant. This program is known as “Millennia Year Application Software System” (MYASS). Next Monday there will be a meeting in which I will show MYASS to everyone. We will hold demonstrations throughout the month so that all employees will have an opportunity to get a good look at MYASS. We have not addressed networking aspects yet, so currently only one person at a time can use MYASS. This restriction will be removed after MYASS expands. Some employees have begun using the program already. This morning I walked into a subordinate’s office and was not surprised to find that he had his nose buried in MYASS. Some of the less technical people may be somewhat afraid of MYASS. Last week my secretary said to me, “I’m a little nervous, I never put anything in MYASS before.” I helped her through the first time and afterward she admitted that it was relatively painless and she was actually looking forward to doing it again, and was even ready to kiss MYASS. There have been concerns over the virus that was found in MYASS upon initial installation, but the virus has been eliminated and we were able to save MYASS. In the future, however, protection will be required prior to entering MYASS. This database will encompass all information associated with the business. As you begin using the program, feel free to put anything you want in MYASS. As MYASS grows larger, we envision a time when it will be commonplace for a supervisor to hand work to an employee and say, “here, stick this in MYASS.”
- A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust. The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?” Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?” The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo. The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response. Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.” “That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car. Then Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?” The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?” “You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud. “Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?” “No guessing required.” answered the cowboy. “You showed up here even though nobody called you. You want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are, and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living, or about cows for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. Now give me back my dog.
- The new #iPhone will have a finger print scanner. Or, in other words, #Apple is about to amass the largest database of biometric data in the world. I’m sure the people of NSA are dancing like little school girls right now.