Milt Hull opened the January general meeting by asking how many people had been hit by a power shutdown during the day, when rolling blackouts were declared in California. Only a few were affected.
Then he went into the merely bad news, which concerns our e-mail. Several members have set up an automatic reply on their e-mail. One subscribed to a distribution list, and that list sent out a message to them. The automatic reply sent out a message saying thanks for the message, I'll get back to you as soon as I can. And the distribution list sent a message that said, "We don't accept e-mails to this distribution list." And it went back and forth until there were something like 600,000 messages.
"The company just folded," Milt said. "I don't know if they were having problems before, but we finally decided that our system is down and this isn't going to work. So Robert DuGaue [of Calweb –Ed.], who is the co-sponsor of our Web site, is the one who pointed us in this direction to the Net Exchange people." Net Exchange (www.nx.com) is the company that was hosting the sacpcug.org e-mail system.
"Robert decided he was responsible for the problem," Milt continued, "and said he would let me experiment with an Intel box. So I'm in the middle of figuring how I can switch our system over and get us back up and running. That may take a month or two, so bear with us. Right now info@sacpcug.org and membership@sacpcug.org and the others do not work.
Another problem the group has had, Milt said, is that "Robert is giving us space for eBlue and is sponsoring our domain registration and paying for all that. But he decided he does not want the 180 megabytes of shareware that we put up on our FTP site, so we took that down and no longer have a shareware site. My apologies on that.
"If you see Brian Smither, give him a thanks since he's the one who does all the work on publishing eBlue, maintains the shareware library, and keeps the SACPCUG.ORG Web site up to date."
Tom Anderson, Sacra Blue’s Content Editor, noted that this month’s issue again reached 60 pages, "sort of."
"Last month I said we wouldn't have that much, but we wound up with it anyway because quite a few people did reviews of software and books. It’s 60 pages combining Sacra Blue and a new PDF file. Ken split out a lot of material that stays the same each month, like the membership application form, credits, SIG meetings, so I'll let him tell you about it.
Ken Hopkins held up the new publication and said, "This is the member’s guide, and it will be updated probably quarterly or when necessary. It has the Chapter information, writing guidelines and the mentor list. This is 16 pages of material that basically doesn't change, so you can print it out if you need it, and everything in Sacra Blue is new material, with a shorter download time."
Tom added, "If you are on the mentor list and decide you don’t want to be anymore, be sure to let us know. Also, if you suspect you’re getting calls from non-members, let us know. We don’t think this is happening, but we want to be sure just in case."
Ken: "The Steering Committee figured out how to send e-mail in bulk, giving notices of meetings. So we are no longer sending out postcards as of next month. If you didn’t get an e-mail message about this meeting, let us know or fill out your info on the computer in the lobby."
