R. J. Grigaitis

I really didn’t think Barack Obama would become President of the United States of America. I didn’t think Americans would be so foolish. In particular, I thought  Catholic Americans would listen to their bishops who did everything they could to say not to vote for Obama without crossing the line of actually saying who to vote or not vote for. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Many of these “Catholics” don’t even know who their bishop is (if you do go to Mass, the name of your bishop gets mentioned in the Eucharistic Prayer).

I thought the day Obama was elected president was a very black day in American history; however, I’ve since changed my mind. According to recent polling data, Obama has had a very positive effect on Americans. It seems that Obama’s radical anti-life stance on a number of issues has wakened up sleeping Americans to these issues. What they really didn’t have an opinion on before, they are now forming an opinion, and that opinion is turning out to be pro-life.

Obama is doing a great job of showing what evil is possible within American borders, and the American public is taking note. The only problem is they have to wait a little more than three years before they can do anything about it.

I hope Sarah Palin runs for president in 2012.

This is a letter I completed today. More information about the PepsiCo boycott can be found here: http://www.boycottpepsico.com

Frito Lay Canada
Consumer Response Center
P.O. Box 40
Cambridge, Ontario  N1R 5S9

Dear Sir,

I must first apologise for taking so long in writing this letter. I see that I created this document on April 13th, but it was not until now, some four months later, that I have found time to complete it.

I am apologising because for the last four months I have boycotted your products, along with all PepsiCo products, which was unfair of me since I did not inform you of my reason for this boycott. With this letter, I am rectifying my negligence.

Before I give you the reason for my boycott, I must say that I have been a big customer of yours; particularly of your Tostitos product. Tostitos have been a basic staple of my diet for many years. I do not think of them as snack food, but an alternative to bread and potatoes. I used to make Tostitos a part of between three and nine meals a week. Four months ago, I switched to the product of one of your competitors, which I consider an inferior product, so I am looking forward to the end of this boycott.

The reason for my boycott is your aggressive role in the culture war regarding homosexuality. I understand that PepsiCo believes it is acting for the good of society; however, I believe, as do many others, that PepsiCo is damaging society. I do not expect PepsiCo to change sides in this culture war, but I do expect you to take a neutral stance on this issue. Until PepsiCo takes a neutral stance regarding the homosexual issue, I will not buy any of your products, and I am encouraging others to join me in this boycott.

These are the specific actions I expect PepsiCo to take before I end my boycott of your products:

• Withdraw membership in the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce (Ford, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart all withdrew from membership when asked to do so)
• Stop requiring employees to attend sexual orientation and gender identity diversity training
• Stop giving financial support to “gay pride parades”
• Stop funding homosexual organisations such as Human Rights Campaign and Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays
• Stop using TV commercials to promote the homosexual lifestyle

Just today I read in the news that a Tim Hortons franchise in Rhode Island pulled its sponsorship from a Marriage and Family Day organised by the National Organization for Marriage due to pressure from the gay and lesbian community. If the gay and lesbian minority can force Tim Hortons to remain neutral by pulling sponsorship for a group that supports the traditional definition of marriage, surely PepsiCo will listen to the majority and also become neutral by pulling support from groups that wish to redefine marriage.

Sincerely yours,
R. J. Grigaitis

I watched the movie  The Shoes of the Fisherman around twelve years ago, and from what I remember, I thoroughly enjoyed it. After learning more about the Eastern Churches and, in particular, the person whom the lead character of this movie is based on, I decided I would have a better appreciation for the story, so I bought the book. It was a well written book, but now that I’ve finished it, I feel that my time would have been better spent reading something more inspirational.

Like many, I saw this story as being prophetic of the pontificate of Pope John Paul II. The book came out in 1963 and the movie came out in 1968. Ten years after the movie came out, Karol Wojtyla became the first Slavic pope, as well as the first one to come from a Communist nation, both of which occur in The Shoes of the Fisherman. Even the names of Pope John Paul II and the protagonist of The Shoes of the Fisherman are similar: Karol and Kiril.

As I said many see the connection between this movie and the pontificate of Pope John Paul II; however, very few people seem to know the actual inspiration for The Shoes of the Fisherman: Major Archbishop Josyf Slipyj.

Josyf Slipyj was the Major Archbishop of the Ukrainian Byzantine (Greek) Catholic Church between 1944 and 1984. A major archbishop has basically the same jurisdiction and autonomy as a patriarch without the actual title of patriarch. Technically, this title didn’t exist until 1963 when Pope Paul VI created this new office instead of establishing Archbishop Slipyj’s see as a patriarchate. Before 1963, Archbishop Slipyj had the same duties, but not as much authority and autonomy.

Such authority and autonomy allowed him to consecrate three bishops without approval of the pope. This annoyed some of the Roman Curia since such ordinations are illicit in Roman canon law (this is why those three bishops of the Pius X Society were excommunicated), but not in Eastern canon law. One of these bishops was Lubomyr Husar, who now holds the office that Major Archbishop Slipyj held.

The KGB offered to make Josyf Slipyj the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church if only he broke union with Rome. He refused, so they put him in a Siberian concentration camp for almost 18 years. In 1960, Blessed Pope John XXIII created him a Cardinal in pectore, and three years later succeeded in bringing him to Rome.

This real story is much more interesting and inspiring than The Shoes of the Fisherman. My favourite part of the movie is when Pope Kiril sneaks out of the Vatican and comes across a dying man in a Jewish community of Rome. When the man dies, Kiril begins chanting a Jewish lament in Hebrew. I don’t know if Josyf Slipyj would have done this, but I do know that his predecessor, Servant of God Metropolitan Andrey Sheptysky, used to preach to the Jews in Hebrew. Unfortunately my favourite part of the movie, the chanting in Hebrew, is not in the book.

Instead of reading The Shoes of the Fisherman, I would have much rather read a biography of Josyf Slipyj or of Andrey Sheptysky. This is a plea to all Ukrainian historians that have a command of the English language: please write a biography about Major Archbishop Josyf Slipyj and one about Metropolitan Andrey Sheptysky.

Remember the last few years leading up to the year 2000? Everyone was talking and worrying about the Y2K bug. I was quite confident back then, and still firmly believe today (although I haven’t looked for actual proof), that a lot of computer programmers made a lot of money by not doing much of anything. I doubt that there were more than a small number of Y2K bugs, and that they were very easily fixed or had negligible impact on business .

I was so confident of this that in 1997 I set the year on my computer at work to 2000. All of the software produced by the company I was working for handled it just fine. In fact, every piece of software on that computer handled it just fine except for one. It’s been 12 years now, so I can’t remember what that one piece of software was, but I do remember that it worked just fine except for displaying the wrong year. I also remember that this one bug would have no impact on my productivity or the productivity of the company I was working for.

Why am I bringing this up? Because there really is a bug that will actually make a large impact on productivity around the world and there is no easy fix for it. This bug will become a major problem on January 19th, 2038 at 3:14:07 Greenwich Means Time (or for you ISO geeks, 2038-01-09T03:14:07+00:00). That’s when the Unix timestamp runs out of seconds.

Now no one seems to be talking about it because very few people know much about computers, let alone what the Unix timestamp is. First of all, Unix and Unix-like operating systems (such as the many versions of Linux) are the main back bone of the Internet. Windows and Mac web servers will not save the day because most of them also use the Unix timestamp, so the Y2K32 bug will effect almost the entire World Wide Web.

The Unix timestamp is the number of seconds before and after the date January 1st, 1970. On January 19th, 2038 at 3:14:07 we run out of seconds.

This may seem like an odd date and time, but it makes perfect sense if you understand computers. Computers don’t count like humans. Computers only know 1 and 0; like a switch, “on” and “off” (actually, that’s all computers are, a bunch of switches). These 1s and 0s (or switches) are called bits. Eight bits are called a byte. If a number in a computer is only one byte in size, it has a range from 0 to 255, or if it is signed (can be negative), -128 to 127.

Here is an example of how a computer counts from 0 to 10 inside a byte:

0 : 00000000
1 : 00000001
2 : 00000010
3 : 00000011
4 : 00000100
5 : 00000101
6 : 00000110
7 : 00000111
8 : 00001000
9 : 00001001
10 :  00001010

Do you get the idea?

If we keep going to 255 we get 11111111. If we add 1 to 255 we go right back to 00000000 because we run out of space in the byte, which has only eight bits (or digits). Likewise, if we subtract 1 from 0 we get 255, or 11111111.

If this byte is signed (can be negative), the computer interprets the first bit as a negative sign. Thus, 255 becomes -1.

Here’s some signed examples

-128 : 10000000
-127 : 10000001
-2 : 11111110
-1 : 11111111
0 : 00000000
1 : 00000001
2 : 00000010
126 : 01111110
127 : 01111111

Now that you know how to count like a computer, lets take a look at the Unix timestamp. The Unix timestamp is not just one byte but four bytes. That means that it’s made up of 32 bits.

Here’s what a 32 bit signed number looks like (I put in some spaces so it’s easier for humans to look at):

-2147483648: 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
-2147483647: 1000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
-2 : 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1110
-1 : 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111
0 : 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000
1 : 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0001
2: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0010
2147483646 : 0111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1110
2147483647 : 0111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111 1111

This means that 2,147,483,647 seconds after midnight of January 1st,1970 is 7 seconds after 3:14 am on January 19th, 2038. One more second wraps us around to 2,147,483,648 seconds before midnight of January 1st,1970, which is 52 seconds after 8:45 pm on December 13, 1901.

As I said, there is no simple solution to this problem. The timestamp can be made unsigned (always a positive number), which would be good until the year 2106, but this would be incompatible with current systems.  Many newer systems use a 64 bit timestamp, which is good until the year 4,292,277,026,596. However, this doesn’t solve  the problem of hundreds of millions of 32 bit systems; many of which are embedded systems that can’t be upgraded. Some file formats also use a 32 bit timestamp. Most people want to keep their data longer than the next 29 years, so this is a major concern.

That’s right. It will be less than 29 years before this all happens. I’ll be almost 69, so as long as I print everything I want to live longer than I do, I should be safe. I think I’ll get rid of my computer when I’m 68 and only read books.