|
(Continued from page 7)
ucts from them. Even if twelve vendors attend (a number that has been difficult to attain), most members can make the rounds of the tables in well under an hour. The main draw continues to be the drawings for products. To get twelve vendors to attend, fifty or sixty have to be solicited. Although the contacting is divided up among the Board members, only Ron Ogg and Alan Mildwurm have on-going personal relationships with many vendors, and that seems to be what it takes these days to get them to attend. Even if a vendor agrees to participate, several follow-up calls are required to keep them on track. For as long as I have been participating the bulk of effort to pull off a successful Windows Night had been done by the President. Regrettably, the rest of the Board (myself included) tend to be slackers in a task that requires high-pressure tactics and diligence.
After considerable discussion in which everyone basically agreed but had to say the same thing in their own words, it was moved, seconded and unanimously approved that we discontinue Windows Night. Some time was then spent discussing alternatives for a special event that would be meaningful, educational and entertaining, and require less effort to succeed. If any members have suggestions, please forward them to the Board!
SIG Night? One suggestion for such an event was to hold a SIG Night wherein the SIGs would make known to the general membership what they are about and what they do at the meetings. Nick, the SIG Coordinator, will pursue this with the SIGs.
Dessert: Dessert was Snickers Candy Bar Cake. This was a huge success! Alan recounted that while studying law for hours at a time, Snickers bars were the ideal thing to jolt him back to wakefulness and re-energize him. Indeed, Snickers bars are one of the most perfect foods. They have hard parts, soft parts and chewy parts. They have sugar for energy, various chemicals and extracts from otherwise natural foods, and of course peanuts are a vegetable. (Some of the Board challenged me on this last statement, but since peanuts come from a plant they are by definition a vegetable -- at least that's what I keep telling my wife, who is also skeptical of this claim.)
College Registration: Jessica mentioned that she had just registered for her fall classes at Davis. This prompted reminisces of the Board as to how registration was accomplished back in their day. Punched cards seem to have been the technology used by most of the Board. In my case, however, the process was entirely manual. I can't believe I predate Ron, I mean some of my older peers. I guess the explanation is that Valparaiso University just didn't have a computer yet. I mean, computers were developed on the east and west coasts, not the mid-west. And in those days it took a while to ship something that size via wagon train.
|
|
