A. Lizard

A.Lizard has been involved with computers and electronics since his first computer class on a vacuum tube and drum memory computer in 1966. Over the years, he's repaired computerized equipment, designed electronic devices, once even Websurfed for a living. He first used e-mail in 1982 on a VAX11-780, which he shared with 100 or so users and which ran exactly 1 MIPS by definition.

He returned to cyberspace in 1987 and has been a visible presence in that environment, first in the BBS community and then on the Internet since then, most currently on the Usenet newsgroup comp.software.year-2000. He has been a student of political history and society since high school and has worked in several political campaigns.

After studying the year-2000 problem, he first built a rather large Web page as a primer to Y2K issues and decided to expand it into a book when he found his Y2K research had grown too large to fit the format he intended for his Y2K online information. That is when he decided to write the book you see.

How to Protect Yourself from the Year 2000 Crisis

Chapter 5. Energy Preparation

Chapter 6. Communications and Other Ways to Burn Juice 

Chapter 30: The Spiritual Side of Y2K - AFTERWORD

Appendix: Outline From Book Proposal

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Copyright © 1998, 1999 by A.Lizard.Use of this material other than "fair use" as provided by copyright law is forbidden. For permission to use this material, contact alizard@ecis.com

Introduction to Web version

These pages are an excerpt from a proposal for a year-2000 (Y2K) preparation book I'd planned to write some months ago. Due to a comedy of errors involving three different, allegedly reputable literary agencies, the book was never submitted to any significant number of publishers. I figured someone might as well benefit from the thousands of hours of research I put in over several months, so I decided to put it on the Web. It's here because it really didn't fit the format of my personal Y2K site. In the unlikely event that a publisher would like to discuss the actual publication of this book this late in the game, I can be contacted at the Internet address in the copyright notice above.

Note: My book will be mainly oriented towards helping people protect themselves in the 1-6 month Y2K scenario, with pointers towards information on how to prepare for much longer if they feel the need to. If I had to give everybody all the information on how to prepare for all contingencies, the book would be the size of the Yellow Pages and might have a potential audience of 1000 or so.

 

Introduction

How to Protect Yourself from the Year 2000 Crisis is intended to tell the buyer how to prepare in a simple, hands-on manner for the kinds of problems expected to accompany the turn of the millenium. The market is the general public with an emphasis on computer users, but it isn't necessary to be a computer user to find this book personally useful. The following is written for the perspective of someone seeing this book for the first time in the spring - summer of 1999.

What kinds of trouble do experts expect all over the world in the year 2000?

What happens if:

  1. Power goes down for a few days. . . or a few months? Remember, 12/31/2000 is the middle of winter.
  2. You can't call 911 because the phones aren't working?
  3. Trucks can't get to your local grocery stores because they can't be refueled because power is down to the electric gas pumps?
  4. The power outage took down your city water supply and sewage?
  5. Computer trouble took down your local fire department?

By the time you see this, you've probably been seeing news stories on the Year-2000 problem, Y2K, or "the millenium bug" every day for the last few weeks or even months. You've probably heard about crashes to state government and large corporate computer systems. You're probably wondering what this means to you. If you are one of the people who didn't get their paychecks or pension checks because of the first wave of computer date-related crashes expected in Spring of 1999, you already know there's big trouble behind and big trouble ahead. If this hasn't happened yet by the time you see this, good. This gives you extra time to prepare. This book will help you put that time to good use.

Prepare for this crisis the way you would prepare for a major hurricane or a tornado. A hurricane doesn't care whether or not you're a computer user. The consequences of the year-2000 crisis won't care who you are, either. If you freeze to death because the utilities in your area celebrated New Year's Eve 1999 by crashing, it won't matter whether you have a doctorate in computer science or dropped out of high school, you're still a lump of frozen meat somebody will have to dispose of.

You don't necessarily have to have a fortified mountain retreat to survive 2000, but you do need information and advice on how to prepare and what to prepare for. This book is an easy to follow, practical guide on what these dangers are and how to deal with them.

The basics of personal Y2K preparation are the same as for any other major long-term disaster. Figure out what to prepare for, how long to prepare for it, and figure out how to keep eating and drinking, how to stay clothed, how to have comfortable shelter. The special circumstances that go with Y2K preparation, such as why you need to keep hard copies of documents, and so on haven't changed. The answers to the above questions have changed sufficiently in important details like vendor selection, some vendors recommended in the older books are gone, informational Web sites come and go, new technologies that affect the best choices for preparation have appeared, that any book prepared with due diligence on the author's part should be more useful, if not better in the sense of literary quality than the older ones.

Dedication: to users of comp.software.year-2000,year-2000 discussion mailing list, year-2000 preparation mailing list and all those involved actively in remediation