Once in a Blue Moon

Remember 10 years ago when there was all the Y2K scare? Those of us that were working in the software industry were going about endless testing in the end of 1999, trying to ensure all the predictions of chaos would not come to fruition on Jan. 1, 2000.

I was on call that night, managing a remote staff.  My Australian staff member had the first glimpse of the New Year and we all breathed easier as all the code continued to work as the time changed across time zones without incident.

I wondered last night whether anyone was worried about date logic this year.  By this time, we should be pretty smart about dealing with coding and testing date logic in our applications, but it does seem to be an error prone area.  And with last night being a Blue Moon and all, I wondered if there were any superstitions or Y2K-like fears that logic would be broken by the unusual circumstance.

I read about Blue Moon in Wikipedia:

Recent popular usage defined a blue moon as the second full moon in a calendar month, stemming from an interpretation error made in 1946 that was discovered in 1999.^[1]

So, in fact, last night’s Blue Moon might not really be a “Blue Moon.” Is there some astrologer somewhere using faulty software that will be confused?  With all the recent interests in Vampires, does something different happen on a Blue Moon? Will the Vampires of the world need to make sure their iPhone apps are working correctly and know whether in fact last night was actually a “Blue” moon? There’s a whole lot more about Blue Moons in the article, but I didn’t see any explanation of exactly why it’s called “Blue.”  It doesn’t look any bluer than any other full moon. As I sat pondering this unusual occurrence of a 2nd full moon, referred to (perhaps erroneously) as blue moon coupled with a passing of a decade, I wondered if the software gurus of the world were catching any unusual bugs…  those types that only happen once in a blue moon..

In any case, we did have a second full moon last night as we passed from the last night of 2009 and into the first day of 2010. I don’t know if it caused any computer glitches or confusion amongst the astrologists and vampires, but it looked pretty darn beautiful to me.

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