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Welcome to Cheryl's List! If you obtained this from someone else and would like your own FREE copy in the future, see the information at the end of this document. Past issues of Cheryl's List can always be obtained at http://www.watsonwalker.com/archives.html.

1. Cheryl Wins CMG's Michelson Award
2. Last Y2K Items

1. Cheryl Wins CMG's Michelson Award

A Note from Tom:

Cheryl has just received a very high honor! Here is the notification from the Computer Measurement Group:

The 1999 A. A. Michelson Award for the 
Advancement of Computer Systems

Cheryl Watson

 
The A. A. Michelson Award, created to recognize those rare individuals who have made significant contributions to the success of the computer evaluation field, is presented to you for your outstanding contributions to computer metrics through:

Your original and significant contributions in the development of a better understanding of the performance and use of computing systems. Your contributions include your Quickstart Service Policy to help installations easily move to Workload Manager goal mode. This was created in response to requests for help since no conversion tools or default service policy existed. Your Quickstart Policy has become widely used since its inception and is still publicly available at no charge.

Your contribution to the education and training of others, primarily through "Cheryl Watson's TUNING Letter", published since 1991, which is used at 1200 installations in over 50 countries. The TUNING Letter
serves as both a tutorial for new performance analysts and as a step-by-step approach for MVS tuning in all areas of analysis, including resource usage, service levels, application tuning, and subsystem tuning.

Your enthusiasm and tireless service to the profession by presenting and writing hundreds of presentations, papers and articles, and your serving as an officer or director for several professional organizations including SHARE and CMG.  Your efforts to present to analysts a clear understanding of the interpretation of performance management technology have enabled them to apply new techniques in support of the goals of their organizations.

It is with great pleasure that this award is presented to you by the membership with the unanimous endorsement of the Executive Committee at the Annual Meeting of The Computer Measurement Group Inc., this 8th day of December, 1999, in the city of Reno, Nevada.
 

Way to go, Cheryl! The quality and integrity of your work, throughout your career and especially during our fourteen years together, has always amazed me. I'm very proud of you!

2.  Last Y2K Items

Our 1999, No. 5 issue has been delayed for a couple of weeks. Since we don't want our subscribers to miss the final Y2K items in the issue, we're including them here. We expect the No. 5 issue to be completed by mid-December and the No. 6 issue to be completed in early January.

IBM Alerts Web Page
IBM is providing a special Year 2000 Alerts Web page based on reported worldwide customer issues during the period of Dec. 28 through Jan. 5, 2000. It will also track the availability of newly-released software Program Temporary Fixes (PTFs) and other assistance to help address date-related issues that may be reported on IBM Year 2000 ready products. See http://www.ibm.com/software/year2000/alert/.

CICS and Y2K
The following items are from Bob Archambeault's upcoming column on CICS performance and include CICS Y2K related items from SHARE:

Richard Buford from Candle corporation reported that Y2K status information is now available for their products at their web site, http://www.candle.com. 

Dave Hrycewicz from Computer Associates reported a new Total Client Care (CA-TCC) service. Registration is fast and free. It provides the ability to open new issues, track existing issues, download fixes, request automatic notification of critical (hyper) maintenance, search for solutions and problems in their knowledge base, and get product announcements. Web page (http://support.cai.com - notice the absence of the www) explains and allows you to register for Total Client Care. Their web site (http://www.cai.com) provides product information and news. 

Dave provided the following three suggestions for using the knowledge base. 
 

1. To find fixes, enter the product code (e.g. ACF2MS, TSSMVS, etc.) or SMP/E FMID, enter the release level and enter a search argument. Use HYPER as a search word to find all critical fixes.

 
2. To get product upgrade information for new OS/390 releases, new CICS releases, etc., enter UPGRADE as the product code, 0.0 for the release number, and the CA product code (e.g. ACF2MS) as the search argument.

 
3. To get year 2000 information, enter YR2000 as the product code, 0.0 as the release number, and the CA product code (e.g. ACF2MS) as the search argument. Note: all year 2000 fixes are considered hyper fixes.


Steve Maxwell from Landmark reported they also have an on-line service at http://www.landmark.com. This service provides on-line technical support for all current production releases of their products. You can search for known problems and download the appropriate fixes, open low priority problems, request product enhancements, get product documentation in HTML or PDF formats, look at frequently asked questions, get maintenance history information, and see compatibility charts. Steve mentioned that "TMON/CICS MVS 8.3" (for CICS/MVS 2.1.2) has been out of support for some time and is NOT year 2000 compliant. If you plan to use this product after the date changes to year 2000, you will have to shut down CICS before the date changes, re-initialize all log and collection files, and COLD start CICS after the date changes. Under no circumstances should you mix pre-Y2K data with year 2000 data. Landmark is in the process of notifying all registered users of this product. 

This may be a good place to mention the keywords for locating IBM Y2K fixes for CICS. The keywords YEAR2000 and YR2000 are associated with all known problems and fixes for CICS. When looking for Y2K fixes use the following keywords:

566540301 R330 YR2000 - for CICS/ESA Version 3.3.0
565501800 YR2000 - for CICS/ESA Version 4
565514700 YR2000 - for CICS TS (Version 5)

Y2K Joke
An animated gif I've mentioned once before:  http://www.wm7d.net/junk/mil_bug.gif

Y2K Happening
This one isn't a joke - it really happened:

Associated Press, Wednesday, October 13, 1999

PORTLAND, Maine, Oct. 12—The state government got its first Y2K surprise months early when owners of 2000 model cars and trucks received titles identifying their new vehicles as "horseless carriages."

Despite millions of dollars spent to ensure state computers are ready for the year 2000, computers in the secretary of state's office got confused over the 2000 model year designation.

That’s all for now. Stay tuned!

Cheryl Watson

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