About a month or two ago, we got some information on the Association of Personal Computer User Groups' (APCUG) CD program. We ordered some and discussed selling them at our general meeting. I borrowed one and looked at it.
It is laid out as Web-based, and mostly zipped and archived for retrieval using a browser. At first I was a little confused about the layout and found it a little hard to navigate, but once I saw how they did it, I found it most easy to read about a program without first un-zipping it and reading the readme file.
I like it. But whether or not it would sell would be determined at the next meeting. We discussed what to do with them if we could not sell them, and whether or not we were in the market to purchase more if they did sell. Well, during the last main PC meeting, we sold over 35 of them.
Each CD holds over 100 programs that are shareware and free programs that you can find on the Web. Most of these are very well-known, like Netscape or Winzip, but some are not very well-known. However, for $5, the CD is worth the price and if we have some left over at the next meeting, I would suggest purchasing one for your collection. Even if you find just one program on there, it is worth your time purchasing one.
After seeing how this program works, I thought about our Sacra Blue CDs that Ken has been discussing, which would contain our past newsletters. The power of this idea is that Ken uses Adobe Acrobat's latest version with the built-in indexer.
For a minimal cost each year, you can purchase these archives and search for articles by a keyword. I have always known it to be a problem of trying to remember which month a certain article was written, and then trying to research the article and going through month by month wasting time trying to find it. If the steering committee agrees with our CD newsletter program and passes it, I would highly recommend purchasing these each year as well.
As far as storing CDs for archive, I choose a sleeve that is only as slim as the CD itself. That way I don't have a bunch of jewel cases, as thick as they are, taking up more room than needed. I would highly recommend this system. I can store about one hundred CDs in a drawer instead of twenty.
What do you do with your old CDs? I was told by someone that the Girl Scouts use them to create projects for the girls to use. I can't imagine what they would build, besides clocks or Christmas tree adornments. I know: we can have a freebie contest next month with our old CDs out in the parking lot. However, they break when they drop, so we'll have to bring a broom.
