The 2012 checklist

[cavac]

Here's my short checklist for 2012.

• 2012 will be a leap year. Check date calculation and validation routines for February/March.
• Beeing a leap year, it has 366 days. If you are doing statistics or are working in Microsoft's Zune team, this might be important to remember.
• The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar (also known as the Mayan calendar) rolls over into a new epoch. Software that works with that (History related data sets, Museums) might have to make a few bugfixes.
• This is a Leap year starting on Sunday. This only happens every 28 years.
• As such, 2012 will have three occurrences of Friday the 13th, which might break one or more Acme modules.
• On June 6, The second and last solar Transit of Venus of the century. The next pair is predicted to occur in 2117 and 2125. You might not want to miss this one!
• In August, the Mars Science Laboratory will land on Mars. This is certainly the coolest RC car ever build, it even has a laser to vaporize things at a distance!
• Update: On December 18th, Perl will have its 25th anniversary (counted from Release of 1.0 on comp.sources.misc)
• Update: Solar cycle 24 is predicted to reach it's maximum. Watch out for Aurora Borealis, coming this year to a night sky near your.

Any important, funny or otherwise interesting items missing? Add a comment with your own list down below!