Sacra Blue Layout Editor Ken Hopkins opened the meeting and noted that Content Editor Tom Anderson was in Europe on a well-deserved vacation. He then called for a moment of silence for the passing of Deep Blue, former columnist for Sacra Blue. He responded to a question from the audience by noting that once you kill off an author you can't bring him back. Then he pointed out that Sacra Blue is 41 pages long this month, and the 41st page is something we haven't had for a while: an advertisement! Adobe placed an ad. Ken said it made sense that they would place an ad in a PDF magazine since they invented PDF in the first place. Ken has gone back to a table of contents as the front cover instead of a picture, which is actually a good thing since the table is made up of jump points. You can click on the article you want to read and go straight to it. The audience showed its approval with applause.
This month Sacra Blue contains a contest for free software. Answer five questions that are spaced throughout the magazine and e-mail your answers to the address listed in the magazine. The first prize this month is Microsoft Streets and Trips, which Microsoft donated. If enough entries are received, Ken will line up more software and arrange it so that attendance at a meeting will not be necessary to win.
Also, Bernie Scovill returns to writing about investing with a new column.
Ken also announced a project to start an e-mail campaign to persuade the Sacramento Bee "to run some great cartoons I found on the Web. The author wants a lot of money for them, but if we can get the Bee to run them, we'll get them for free. I'll have all the information in the next Sacra Blue. They are good cartoons."
Ken has been preparing two versions of Sacra Blue each month, a screen and a printer version, on the theory that the printer version gives more resolution and looks better. "And the printer version is only twice as big. But with the Adobe ad in there, it suddenly went to nine megabytes for the printer version. I knew there was a resolution difference, but I wanted to know what the real difference was. So I printed out two. You can see a difference, but does anyone care? That's what I want to know," he said, asking for feedback.
President Milt Hull asked the audience: "How many people last month solved a computer problem they were proud of? Right here we have five to seven potential writers. Just write it down and Ken will fix it for publication."
Downloading Sacra Blue
Webmaster Brian Smither, who is also Secretary and Shareware Librarian, discussed the blue postcard mailed each month to alert members that Sacra Blue is available, and to remind them about the upcoming meeting. "On this card that members get every month, I want to talk about the link that points you to Sacra Blue's PDF file. A member mentioned to me he typed in the address in his browser, but then started showing characters and numbers and unrecognizable junk in the browser window.
"Obviously, his browser was not set up to display the contents of the PDF file using Macromedia's PDF plug-in. With many of you that's not a problem. Some browsers will give you a dialog window asking whether to open and display the file, or save it to disk. Hopefully, you all answer 'save to disk.' It's far easier to download the file all in one shot, get offline, then read it at your leisure. printing it if you want. But some browsers don't give that option and will immediately try to display the PDF file. The solution is to type 'frontpag.html' instead of 'SB0800.PDF.' There you will see the link for the PDF file. You right-click the link to pop up a menu where you can choose 'Save Link As...', 'Save Taget As...', or whatever it is specific to your browser. That's my preferred way to download the PDF.
"A comment from the audience suggests I put the link to the PDF on our home page. I hear a round of applause, so that's what I'll do.
"To get to the Sacra Blue/eBlue archives, go to the current Front Page and in the left panel click on 'archive.'"
Milt noted that "we began using the postcards because we wanted to include information on the newsletter for folks who don't come to the meetings. So we re-engineered the database, and if you're not getting a postcard, there's either something wrong in the database about the address, which needs to be corrected, or something else. We've established an e-mail address of membership@sacpcug.org that goes to our membership director. She can resolve any problems with mailing addresses, or you can look in the current issue and get her phone number.
"The other thing we're working on is that we surpassed our e-mail limitation of 40 people when we sent Sacra Blue out. So I had that extended, and actually put them on my personal account. We'll soon have everyone set up with an individual e-mail address of firstname.lastname. That also has a bunch of aliases: President, Vice-President, and so on, and freeware, membership, and more. We owe a great deal of thanks to someone Frank Leonard introduced to the club, Robert DuGaue, founder of CalWeb Internet Services, who has really been helping us. We don't pay for the disk space he lets us use, and a few months back he donated a thousand dollars to the club to help us get out of our slump."
Milt observed that "we're out of the red this month and doing very well. That also had to do with a lot of renewals we got, but we've also gotten this meeting room cheaper, and cut back in other areas. Our Treasurer, Don Frieze, has done a lot in the financial area, telling us early on that if we kept going the way we were going, we'd be broke fast. We were listening, but didn't know what to do at first. So thanks to Don."
Future Speakers
In September Milt and Ken are scheduled to do the entire presentation, and will be talking about MP3 and everything related. "We'll show you how to rip a CD and how to burn a CD and some of the more popular programs and explain all the weird terms," Ken said. "In October Microsoft will be here to show Windows 2000 and the Windows Millennium Edition. You'll be able to compare and know which one you really want to use. In November Milt and I will be gone, so Tom Anderson will head up a shareware extravaganza. Various people-including you if you want to-will show off their favorite shareware. For December we tentatively have Parallax, from Rocklin, who make little controllers so you can learn more about computers. I don't know who will be our second speaker, although I've come across an operating system by the people who did GeoWorks that doesn't require a whole lot of memory. It runs well on a 286 in a windowing environment. In January I have pencilled in eHelp, which used to be Blue Sky Software; they make RoboHelp, an excellent way to make help files and now, to make Web pages."
Offer extended
