{"id":18917,"date":"2016-12-31T16:14:57","date_gmt":"2016-12-31T16:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=18917"},"modified":"2016-12-31T16:14:57","modified_gmt":"2016-12-31T16:14:57","slug":"another-year-down-the-tubes-happy-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=18917","title":{"rendered":"Another year down the tubes … Happy New Year!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Those of us who remember the days when we had telephones with coiled cords and\u00a0TVs that took forever to turn on have learned to live\u00a0in whole\u00a0new world.<\/p>\n

We recall waiting with bated breath for the 21st century. My dad was one of them. He\u00a0looked forward to seeing\u00a0the year 2000. He didn’t make it, but we had many conversations about that momentous event.<\/p>\n

Here\u00a0we are. Another year is passing into history. And we’re another year close to the end of the second decade of the 21st century.<\/p>\n

Yes, it’s true that time accelerates the older you get.<\/p>\n

So we’re about to enter 2017. Just three\u00a0more years an we enter the third decade of this\u00a0once-new era.<\/p>\n

And this conjures up a memory of when we got ready for we called\u00a0“Y2K.” You remember it, yes?<\/p>\n

It seems\u00a0all so quaint now.<\/p>\n

As 1999 drew to a close, I was working for the Amarillo Globe-News. We\u00a0prepped for the big change in a most fascinating way.\u00a0The newspaper’s publisher\u00a0took all those fears about the world coming to an end as we entered the 21st century quite seriously. Perhaps too<\/em> seriously, as it turned out.<\/p>\n

On Dec.\u00a031, 1999, he issued a directive that all our electronics systems were\u00a0to be shut down by some ridiculous time — hours<\/em> before we\u00a0were to go to\u00a0press. He spoke to us about the potential consequences of failing to\u00a0be prepared for when the clock struck midnight and we entered a new year beginning with the number “2.”<\/p>\n

I’d heard the fears: Nuclear missiles would launch; satellites orbiting the planet would crash to Earth; computer systems would catch fire and\/or explode; motor vehicles would\u00a0stop functioning.\u00a0All of it.<\/p>\n

My boss was so concerned he ordered us to shut down our newsgathering and printing operations … which meant that the Jan. 1, 2000 edition of the Amarillo Globe-News had next to zero breaking news in it. We had a lot of feature material, though.<\/p>\n

That was then.<\/p>\n

We’ve gotten a good bit more sophisticated about these computer issues.<\/p>\n

Time and technology have moved us forward.<\/p>\n

I’ll spare you my thoughts about the year that’s about to pass into history’s dust bin. It kinda sucked and I’ve spoken my piece already about that.<\/p>\n

But oh, my, has time flown by since\u00a0our knuckles locked up while we waited for Y2K.<\/p>\n

One thing doesn’t change for me, though, even with technology advancing as rapidly as it has done. I always await the new year with a sense of optimism, that the new year will be better than the immediate past year.<\/p>\n

So it is that we welcome 2017. We’ve got nowhere to go but up, correct?<\/p>\n\n

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Those of us who remember the days when we had telephones with coiled cords and\u00a0TVs that took forever to turn on have learned to live\u00a0in whole\u00a0new world. We recall waiting with bated breath for the 21st century. My dad was one of them. He\u00a0looked forward to seeing\u00a0the year 2000. He didn’t make it, but we … Continue reading Another year down the tubes … Happy New Year!<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,13],"tags":[6810,6808,4536,6809],"class_list":["post-18917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-news","category-national-news","tag-21st-century","tag-happy-new-year","tag-technology","tag-y2k"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18917"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18917\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18919,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18917\/revisions\/18919"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}