Milt Hull opened the meeting, welcomed visitors, then noted that he had good news and bad news. The bad news is that the e-mail system that he has been working on has a flaw that allows users to have an automatic reply. If the e-mail system sends a user an e-mail, their automatic reply system could send a user’s message in reply (for example, "I’m out of the office this week."). When you send that to a distribution list, it will send back an e-mail saying "You can't reply to that," and the auto-reply sends back another response, and it keeps going back and forth. You eventually get about 190,000 e-mails, which shut out system down. Milt thought, "Well, I know who the person is, so I'll just go in there and fix it, and well, the system is down. It's completely down. The Web site works, but no one can log onto it. It's partly my fault. We were beta testing. We'll have to come up with a new drawing board."
"So the news," Milt said, "is our MX-DNS is going to another site. DNS is Domain Name Service. The DNS is the Web page address. An e-mail message looks for the MX address, which could be totally separate from the Web page. MX stands for Mail Exchange. Robert DuGaue of CalWeb is taking care of our Web site and is in charge of our DNS, and he pointed our MX record to this company back East at our request. He's the one who came up with the idea. I'll talk with him soon and we'll come up with an alternate plan soon. That's the bad news.
"The good news is that we are dropping our dues. (Applause) I can't take credit for this because it comes from the Steering Committee. We are restructuring the group and going from paper to electronic format for our newsletter, which saved the group from dying. Now we've gotten the group out of the red and into the black, and we decided to give some back, especially to the members who stuck with us when we were trying to save the club. People who renewed within the last six months will get an extension. Those who join tonight will get an extension.
"The price change doesn't go into effect until January, but don't let that stop you. If you join or renew at $35 tonight it will stretch you out. After our treasurer Don Frieze worked out the details, we decided on a $5 reduction. This meeting hall has dropped its price for us while we are going through these trying times, and we don't know when they will ask for an increase," so the group can’t risk a larger reduction.
The Sacramento Chamber of Commerce asked if SPCUG wanted to join as a group. Roy Korb did all the work of contacting the appropriate people and making the arrangements.
Roy Korb: "They gave us two plaques we can display as members of the Chamber of Commerce. I have copies of their magazine—first come, first serve. They have a lot of benefits, some free, some minimal charge.
"On January 18th, there's a free champagne toast, so if any members want to go, you can. Some dinners are $20 for members (that's us), and $30 for non-members. If anyone has business cards, you can take them down and display them in the C of C lobby. They said the only requirement is that it would be wise to have something on the card identifying you as a member of the group. Otherwise they may not leave them there," Roy said.
"If you go to any function, you can pass out business cards or brochures. Today there was one business who said they have tripled their business just through advertising, and going around to these events. So there are a lot of possibilities there. The World Trade Center is available down there. There is a discount for joining. Some of the World Trade Center opportunities are: A company in Taiwan needs a mineral or pure water provider. A company in Germany urgently needs lifting magnets. A trading company in Jordan needs to buy a substantial quantity of fish. And a company in China needs frozen goose heads. These are legitimate. They have about 3,000 members, so if you're in business and want to take advantage, it's there."
Milt: "Roy won a book there about the history of Sacramento. Next month we're going to have a drawing for it.
"The Chamber of Commerce is like any other metropolitan association. You have to be involved. If you want to promote your business you have to attend functions and give out your business cards like candy and do networking and promote yourself," Milt noted. "As User Group members you are now members of the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce."
Layout Editor Ken Hopkins, soloing for Sacra Blue this month because Content Editor Tom Anderson was unable to attend, said, "We ended up with a 60-page issue this month. We were a little surprised because there were a bunch of entries that didn't get in because they weren't turned in on time, and yet we ended up with 60 pages. It is a big download, but I think you'll find it worth your while. It has all of the reviews of favorite shareware from last month's meeting, along with the links to download them.
"Next month we'll do a highlight on palm-sized computers and tell you how to choose what’s best for you, as well as reviews of palm-sized software. If you have a favorite software for Palm or Pocket PC, let us know. We want plenty of reviews to balance them out. Our issue comes to about 6 megabytes, and with DSL it takes about 4 minutes to download."
Milt discussed his experiences at this year’s Comdex convention. "Comdex was interesting, although not much was new. I did find that other User Group Round Table attendees were shocked that we still pay for a meeting place. Most of them meet at schools or halls that are donated for the club’s use. The only downside of that is that they cannot sell on the premises, so if a speaker has a deal, they cannot take advantage of that. We did get some good ideas for fundraisers. We are pretty successful as a group, in comparison to others I talked to.
"I also went to a party and saw Bill Gates and Melinda dancing," Milt added. "You don’t get a lot of sleep at Comdex. You get up early, go to breakfast, hit the show, go to lunch somewhere, hit another show, then there’s dinner, and afterward there are parties and you have to go to at least four of them. So you get in about 1 a.m. and the next morning you get up at 7 and do it again. Dana Carvey showed up at the Novell party and did a little comedy relief. He pretended the big red N logo was a monolith from the 2001 movie, and ran around like one of the monkeys—it was funny."
Milt: I did go to the Chili Cookoff, which is a fund-raiser for kids. John Walsh [host of America’s Most Wanted – Ed.] shows up every time and explains where the money goes and how many have been helped. Thursday I went to the Nascar Café and raced their little cars. It was so true-to-life I was feeling motion sickness when I got off. Friday night we went to the Eiffel Tower [at the Paris Hotel] and had dinner."
Milt said "the hot new thing at Comdex was fingerprinting, which was hot last year, and Palm devices everywhere. There's a war between Microsoft and Palm over handhelds—there are more applications written for Palm, but Microsoft Windows CE [Pocket PC] does more.
"I did buy a photo printer there. The printer has infrared ports and can read memory stick cards, so if you have a digital camera you just take the stick out and push a button— you don't need a PC—and tell it what you want printed. It's the HP PhotoSmart. It was $500. Mine had the duplex option."
Ken, in his role as co-meeting coordinator, said, "There was nothing earth-shattering at Comdex, but we may have lined up some good speakers.
"For upcoming presentations, we have a guest appearance next month with a HAL 9000 computer and we have the eHelp people to show us RoboHelp, and we're going to have a homegrown presentation on genealogy.
"In February we have nominations for the elections, but we’re still working on speakers. We're trying to squeeze the Palm Pilot people in. March is our elections, and so far we have Quicken and Quickbooks. We haven't filled up the rest of the schedule. We're waiting for people to recover from Comdex. I have a list of over 30 people I want to contact. Some will want to come out to demonstrate what they have and others will send us product for giveaways."
