We're all doomed. Techweek reports Cisco CEO John Chambers plans to be working with his programmers on New Year's Eve. Anyone who has ever worked on a software project knows what kind of code gets produced by programmers while the CEO is hanging around :-) http://www.techweek.com/articles/6-28-99/countdow.htm On to something a little more serious, although its going to sound a bit strange. Imagine you had a special phone which always worked and can call any number in the world. It has just one limitation. The phone has only 9 speed-dial keys. And no cheating, you can't call the AT&T/MCI/Sprint/etc operator to dial a number which wasn't pre-programmed, and no third-party call forwarding. What Internet specific resources would you like to have access? Assume police, fire, medical, telephone repair, generator repair, etc are already handled. Here was my list: - Cisco TAC (Have you paid your IOS service contract yet?) - MFS (MAE-East tech on duty) - Merit (Route Server, Gated) - Internet Software Consortium (Have you paid your BIND service contract yet?) - UUNET NOC (if the 800lbs ISP falls over, we're all going to feel it) - Sendmail, Inc (after TCP/IP, mail is something all NOC's depend on) - Sun Microsystems (for those not running Linux) - ARIN (assuming APNIC and RIPE are mirrored) - My home phone (Family is important too) I went through my old tickets, and besides telephone repair, its remarkable how infrequently most of the Internet stuff we depend on breaks. So I based my list not on how likely something would break, but on how bad it would be if it did break. Nothing may happen, but assuming such a list affected the setting of priorities, any changes to my list and why? -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation