World sighs in relief... The NIBL Survives Y2K

Jan 4, 2000... Bill Krieger

Happy New Year everyone. For those who saw it (and got it), I hope you enjoyed the "fake" NIBL y2K bug page that was up the past few days. I couldn't resist.

For those interested in minutia, the NIBL did have a real Y2K bug this morning when I did the update for week 10's games. My friends at www.nba.com did a nice job on me. The NIBL sucks the stats for NBA games out of the NBA web site, via some hack software that I wrote. Well, the NBA was using two digits to store the year 1999 ("99") and as of Jan 1, started using 4 digits for the year 2000 ("2000"). Well, this threw my software for a loop and I had to perform very minor surgery.

I really am surprised at the dearth of Y2K problems, especially overseas. There are so many little programs, file formats, databases, etc. that used the two-digit date format. The side effect of the www.nba.com is an example of what I would have thought we'd see more of. Oh well, I guess people are more competent that I expected.

On the lighter side, I had the pleasure of attending a Bulls game yesterday (against the Portland Trailblazers) with the owners of the beleaguered Elk Grove Cougars. Of source, the Cougars (like the Bulls) are pulling up the rear of the league and actually have fewer victories that the Bulls. Here are the highlights:

  • It was Scottie Pippen's first game in Chicago since he left the beloved Bull. Before introducing Scottie, they showed a couple minute video tribute to Scottie and the Bull' six rings... Scottie carrying Michael off the court in Utah, Scottie dunking (and then peeing on) Patrick Ewing, Scottie and Michael tackling Rodman out of bounds to keep him from attacking some other player. Excellent! Scottie got about a five minute standing "O".

  • Then the game started and Scottie introduced Randy Brown to a leather sandwich on, what Randy Brown thought, was an open layup. Awesome!

  • Bull lose, of course: 31 turnovers, shot 33%, they had 2 points after 8 minutes of the first quarter.

  • There was humor off the court as well as Elk Grove's co-owners, Moz and Mark, implored their starting center, A Sabonis, to score-rebound-assist-block-and-steal his way into NIBL heaven. The result: 22 nibls in 19 minutes. Better than Elk Grove's average, eh.

The only disappointment of the night was missing an opportunity to stop at the "Catfish Corner". Ummm good.

yow, bill

PS - For sale: 100 gallons of bottled water, 12 cases of granola bars, ham radio, 2 generators (never taken out of the box), 50 gold Krugerands, and 3 months-worth of baby food & formula. Please pay in check... I have lots of cash laying around.

PPS - The picture of the two "dudes" at the top of the page(thanks Johnny Rai) is from "The Big Lebowsky"... a solid 3 1/2 bill-stars! Check it out... duude!