Your Year 2000 Survival Guide: A Common Sense Handbook
Authors: Jackie Kessler
Venue:  (1999)

:This book, Your Year 2000 Survival Guide: A Common Sense Handbook can help you with checklists, exercises, and suggestions tailored to your environment, urban, suburban, or rural, cold or warm climate. It assists you in assessing the impact of the Year 2000 on you and your family, and helps you make the necessary plans. The approach is to provide you with a low-cost, well-organized plan to get through the millennium changeover with minimum discomfort. After reading so many alarmist articles about the Y2K issue, it was comforting to read a straightforward analysis of the problem and to receive sane advice about what to do to prepare. Thanks to Dr. Kessler's common sense approach - and with little personal effort, inconvenience or expense - I can provide myself with the proper sanitation; enough food and water; the necessary energy and communication sources; and copies of important documents and financial statements to get me through whatever the Y2K bug might cause. Her exercises and checklists at the end of each chapter allows me on my far-away-island, or anyone who lives in the city, suburbs or country, to tailor Dr. Kessler's advice to his individual needs. Thank you, Dr. Kessler. -- Nan, a reader Dr. Jackie Kessler is a consultant, speaker and author on Year 2000 issues. She left her position as the Director of Year 2000 Programs for the Computer Systems Group of Unisys Corporation to write her first book. Her principal responsibilities were to ensure client awareness of the Year 2000 status of all CSG new and installed hardware and software products. She created the Unisys Year 2000 website recognized by Business Week as the first web site to provide clients with the requisite Year 2000 information. In that capacity she led all engineering organizations to inspect, modify, test and report on the broad spectrum of products from check sorters to large scale integrated systems. She developed the Year 2000 Ready&8482;trademark as a mark of quality for each individual product. In addition to developing informational programs for clients she encouraged the development of tools, aids, roadmaps and methodologies to assist clients in traversing the millennium with their installed software. While at Unisys, Dr. Kessler ensured that one major segment of the Unisys mainframe base of clients made a successful transition through a similar date related issue in 1996 and that not one client had a serious disruption of either Unisys or their own software. Her emergency preparedness expertise was gained over years from many experiences including organizing a four-week trip down the John Muir trail, extensive backpacking in the Sierras and making the 35 miles from Tuolumne Meadows to Yosemite Valley twice. Dr. Kessler has seen most of what nature and man can throw at us and has managed beautifully through blizzards, ice storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, blackouts, international government uprisings and Three Mile Island. Very early childhood experiences of changing tires and fixing appliances during WWII while her Father was serving, helped her develop a keen sense of always being prepared for everything. She and her family live on a 15-acre farm and when the electricity was out, the cattle had to be watered by hand carried buckets from the swimming pool. During the Three Mile Island fiasco, she had to develop an evacuation plan for herself, her parents, her children and 5 dogs. Dr. Kessler and her family easily managed to exist in a hotel in Hawaii during Hurricane Iwa - they duck taped windows, moved mattresses, used a lantern, and cooked in their room - while all around them was chaos. The ACM Portal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright © 2010 ACM, Inc. Terms of Usage Privacy Policy Code of Ethics Contact Us Useful downloads: Adobe Acrobat QuickTime Windows Media Player Real Player