President Milt Hull opened the meeting by welcoming first-time visitors, then introduced Sacra Blue co-editors Tom Anderson and Ken Hopkins. Tom discussed the ongoing difficulties with producing a meeting report and having the meeting transcribed, and noted that Sacra Blue was late because of that problem. He said the Steering Committee was continuing to seek out services to transcribe the meeting for our meeting reporter, Gordon Taylor, to write the article from.
Tom said previous editors had, at some point in the past, gone to having a complete transcript made of the meeting and that Terry Naleway had for several years handled the job single-handedly. Eventually she "burned out," and Dennis Solheim began the task, later assisted by new member Twila Carver. But having non-professional volunteers handle the work took a long time and pushed back the publication date of the newsletter.
For this month, he said, a solution has been worked out but the cost is still undetermined. Nevertheless the editors hope to have next month's issue out on time once again. In the meantime, he said, he and Ken hoped to have the current issue posted over the coming weekend.
When the issue is posted, members will be able to read articles about the coming "digital convergence," when all devices get combined into one handheld phone/fax/organizer, etc. Tom also mentioned some of the interesting Web sites featured in his "Click Here" column: one that tells how to kill off Microsoft's Clippy, the obnoxious assistant in Office; several sites that provide tutorials and extra tools for Paint Shop Pro; a site to register to opt out of some spam; and "one ultimate Web site that you have to see," but he declined to give more details.
Milt announced that Robert DuGaue, who founded Calweb (our Web space provider) and built it into the largest local ISP, had been let go by the company that purchased it from him. Milt pointed out that Robert had donated $1,000 to the group last year when we were in financial straits and has frequently provided expert assistance when the group needed it.
Milt and Ken reminded the group about Microsoft's extreme event coming up on June 2. On the same night, SPCUG volunteers will be staffing the phones for KVIE's membership drive. Ken, who arranges the volunteers each year for the drive, said he still needed more volunteers to fill out the 18-25 needed for the evening.
Ken also announced that one of the evening's speakers, who was to demonstrate the Franklin E-Book, would not be present. The person who was to make the presentation has left the company, and the company declined to send anyone else, but didn't let Ken know until the day before the meeting. But LapLink did show up and would make sure we got a good presentation, Ken said.
In June, Microsoft will show Office XP and the second speaker has not yet been determined. Microsoft will also show Office XP on June 14 at an official rollout at the Convention Center.
A spontaneous discussion broke out about the Office Registration Wizard, which requires contacting Microsoft for a second installation code to use the program more than 50 times.
At the July meeting, Ztrace will show its laptop-tracking software, and Gene Barlow, who has previously shown Partition Magic, will make a presentation about Drive Image, hard drive duplication software. The October meeting will feature a presentation about e-commerce, arranged by the E-Commerce SIG.
