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(Continued from page 7)
hours, was too tired to come to the meeting. The crisis thus passed, and we proceeded with our regular business.
Old Business:
Club PC Upgrade: Nick's idea of getting a new monitor through Sony has not worked out and we again gave Craig confusing and contradictory instructions and sent him off to buy a monitor.
Speakers: Alan announced that in July we would have Keyspan and Proxim; and in August Active Concepts. There was some vagueness to this schedule, but that is normal. Some vendors can't plan more than three days in advance, and the fluidity of the job market can also result in your scheduled presenter moving to the competition the day before their scheduled appointment with DVPC.
Alan mentioned that we should continue with our Board (read "Ron Ogg") presentations, and a discussion of topics followed his comment. Mark suggested security/privacy as a topic to cover, and that relates to one or more of our pending vendors. Then we discussed having an authoritative speaker like Jim Warren or Larry Magid.
After more discussion possible agendas, something was tentatively decided and we moved on. According to the last note I took on this, in August we will have Active Concepts, and either a guest speaker or one of us will talk on security/privacy.
Brochures: Peggy and I had reviewed the current draft of the brochure put together by Mark. He had sent me an electronic copy to edit, but that turned out to be more difficult than one would think. First off, it was built using Microsoft's Publisher 2000, and I have Publisher '98. Mark warned me that the 2000 edition warns of potential problems using older version to edit documents created using 2000, and he was right.
I am not a big fan of Publisher. There are aspects of it that are less than intuitive, and my training as a programmer has taught me never to read the directions, so I tend to fumble a bit, sometimes finding a way to do something in fourteen steps that could actually be done in three. Let's just say that by the time I was through, most of the words were the ones I wanted to use, and were generally in nearly the correct place.
I had printed a couple of samples, and my fellow Board members added their two cents to my changes. But I gave the file and the task back to Mark to fix, washing my hands of the matter.
New Business:
Random Excess: There was additional discussion public speaking, file associations and DSL. Joe Silva, in a minute of confusing pontification, made the shrewd observation that it is "hard to follow the train of thought of the Board: Amen!
Then there came a point in time when we wanted to ask Craig a question but couldn't find him. His papers were still on the table and no one remembered seeing him leave, but no one remembered at what point he left. Knowing Craig is a postal employee, our first concern was for the safety of Alan's family and ourselves (maybe not in that order, but you get my point). A quick search of the house failed to turn him up. Some of us were beginning to get worried: if we kept wasting time looking for Craig, we might be here extra late. We got back to business, although people still kept looking around at every strange sound.
A few minutes later Craig was spotted out the front window walking on the sidewalk, coming to the front door. Now we knew he must have gone out, but still no one remembered it. It seemed somehow out of character that he felt a sudden urge to walk or jog around the block. The mystery was solved when Craig came in and announced that he had gone out to his car to get something and had been working on his car for the past twenty minutes. His hands were dirty and greasy, so we bought his story.
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