Sacra Bytes
She was over 80 when she passed- 82 months and 4 days old to be exact. I remember the morning when, under the direction of the Steering Committee, I assisted in the functional demise of the old gal. September 9 was a mild, mostly sunny day. The air was clean and warm. Birds were singing in the back yard. At about nine minutes after nine in the morning I calmly reached over and pulled the plug. Just an hour before that, she had routinely taken her last call, completely unaware she would never again experience another modem negotiation nor another upload.
We Done Good
On Saturday, September 18, we had our first PC Jamboree. The event was organized by Beth Camero and Edwin Holloway and staffed by some twenty hardworking volunteers. I think we can qualify the event as a complete success.
On top of adding four new members, the event grossed over $300 from class fees and donations, many from those who brought a good number of computers in for repair. All but one of the computers left the Jamboree without the ills they had when they were set before our volunteers.
Many copies of older commercial software packages were given away at the freebie table while other folks brought used software and hardware to sell. At the end of the day, we raffled off two copies of Lotus Smart Suite Millennium Edition, and Adobe's Photo Deluxe Business Edition.
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I think every single person who attended seemed to enjoy the activities. Although the classes were the biggest draw, they were my only misgiving. I know the folks who attended the classes got something out of it, but it was evident (from hindsight) that the classes were too short. Some topics can be done in an hour, but others will need two or more hours. We'll just have to work on that when we hold our next event.
I sincerely hope we can continue to do this sort of thing for our members. Thanks to Wes Doak and the folks over at Sacramento Access; we have the location, the rooms and equipment -all at extremely reasonable rates- which can allow us to do things we would never have considered before. As always, the big problem is getting volunteers together to pull it all off. We have a wonderful opportunity to give training and other services to our members and be a truly valuable resource to the community. I would hope more of our members would be able to find the time to donate an hour to two on a Saturday to help make this a regular event.
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