Chateau

Last day of the year. I can't say it's been the best year on record, though I've had some good days during the year. To my amazement one of my blips made it into The Guardian today, which is nice. I don't think it's my best picture of the year, but it does fit into the weather theme quite well.

Today's blip is a 1999 French stamp and has the price in both Francs and Euros on it. For a while after the change you would see dual prices in supermarkets, but in shops where they manually did the prices the old Franc prices vanished almost overnight. These days even the supermarkets don't print anything in Francs, the old money is long gone now and you cant even convert notes or coins any more.

I remember 1999 because of the Y2K problem, which a lot of people spent a lot of money dealing with, so while it did actually cause a lot of problems, it didn't cause the catastrophe it would have if code hadn't been fixed an cleaned up. We had a problem with our code, it was based on something bought from someone bought from Microsoft and it didn't do the leap year calculation correctly in 2000 - which was very embarrassing as I took the call from the client who noticed it first....!

As we put 2020 to bed, I think we are all looking forward to a better 2021.

Happy New Year to everyone! Bonne année à tous !