President Dick Towle called the meeting to order promptly at 7:00 PM and started immediately into the evenings program. Reason being that he was using his laptop computer without a power supply and didn't want the battery to go dead before he was ready to launch into the program later on.
The program was to be on Dragon Naturally Speaking, and although the program worked at his home faultlessly, it did not want to cooperate at the meeting. On top of that, the lamp in the overhead projector burned out and had to be changed, with some difficulty.
Dick did explain that it was necessary to teach the program for at least 45 minutes in order to get a 95% accuracy in transcription. Perhaps a bit longer reading a prepared text for all your words to be accepted by the program would be better. It was believed that this demonstration might well be repeated at the October meeting.
The auction of the clubs old computer was spiritedly attended and ended up with two persons bidding against each other with the Secretary finally winning with the final bid.
Dick showed off his new toy, the latest Sony Digital Camera with all the bells and whistles on it at about $1300. It uses a small disk that just happens to fit in the CD-Rom that all machines have and it holds, depending upon what resolution you use, hundreds of photos. Interestingly enough, with a cable you can record from your computer to the camera or visa versa and the camera disc drive becomes a drive letter as though it were part of the computer. There is so much about this camera that it changes the whole meaning of photography as we use to know it. This has a 'through the lens' viewfinder as well as the digital viewer. Zooming is both optical and digital, with so many options it blows the mind. The camera is rather large but not heavy and is easy to hold. This particular camera also took the same size filters as the older Minolta camera used, so Dick was quite pleased that he was able to use what he already had.
Some hardware and some software was raffled off with everyone having a chance to win something. Many of the old floppy disks of shareware were offered at $1.00 each to those who may want to try them out. These are the remnants of our old shareware programs from years past.
Refreshments were served as usual courtesy of the Secretary. The meeting was a success with a new member joining and several guests showing an interest, and adjourned at 9:00 PM.
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Ken Weger
