Todays meeting was held at the PCUG's Belconnen Centre. It is certainly bigger, brighter and better than the Fyshwyck premises and the committee should be able to capitalise on their new location. For those that haven't been there, it is in Northpoint Plaza, just opposite the Mall. Ken Livingstone expressed his thanks to all those who helped with the move, and there will be another "final" move next Sunday, 22 Sep 1996. A large part of the meeting was taken up in discussion arising from Phillip Bell's paper. I hope he posts his paper here or tip.general, but he is generally concerned with the size of the Users Group and the volunteer effort to run it. Mike Hodgkin from the national trust was there. he thought he had the largest community group in Canberra, and it was only through trying to find out how to get on the Internet, did he find the PCUG to be the largest. His concern was that in general, governments in their rationalisations, tended to expect more unpaid work from community organisations, his organisation being no exception. His exercise in trying to get on the net had left him floundering, a whole new ball game ! He was supported by Colin O'Keefe from Parks and Conversation, and there was quite a lot of discussion. The main points being that: The C&C group of the PCUG is really not in the position of a lobby group, but certainly enjoys a good discussion. The mission Statements of the PCUG are fairly straight forward and they are not fixed, they can be amended by the members to reflect changing member expectations or social needs. Apparently the PCUG committee is looking at the Family/Corporate/Association membership issue. In the C&C group, there are quite a number of people engaged in volunteer activities, which seemed to reinforce Phillip Bell's notion of a Club of Clubs, something for volunteers to help volunteers. (Guess we do that at C&C anyway). Generally supported his paper and saw no reason why it shouldn't be put up to the committee. Perhaps we will discuss it again next meeting. All in all a very interesting discussion but it had to cut short for there were a number of other items that needed attention. Mike Dinn had a number of queries, How do you make a PDF file?... Use acrobat distiller. What is the best Phone program ?.. IPhone has 47%, Web Phone is 23%, FreeTel third. John Saxon wanted to plug IPhone, he really believes in it. How can you take VGA and turn it into a composite suitable for a VCR or TV ? How much are you willing to pay ? There are a number of options, they all cost money. Analysing his problem there were alternative solutions, like use more monitors, or use the Bell and Howell projector system which has Adobe , amongst other things built into it. Why does TIP have a firewall ? Never got the answer to this, the conversation drifted into TIP's cache and whether or not it is causing more problems than it is worth, presumably it will all be psyched out eventually. Cliff Manley's WIN 95 system crashed and took his CD ROM driver into cyberspace and he wondered why, and so did a lot of other people, no answer to this one. Peter Hodge is getting a 1.3gb drive and wondered if that or his 540mb drive should be the primary drive. Answer was to make the 1.3 gb drive the main one, and there was quite a bit of discussion on cluster sizes and Drive Space, one member reclaiming 80 mb after using Drive Space. Derrick Boyd had installed another 2 mb of RAM, but his machine wouldn't recognise it. He was given sufficient advice to let him play with his BIOS for the next couple of weeks, hopefully he will be able to report good news next meeting. Couple of reports, FERRET is a program that will find any e-mail address, and OILCHANGE is a program that will keep your programs up to date, but the reporter hadn't got it to work yet, and thought it was a TIP cache problem. And Gloria had returned from the tropical isles, welcome back, but for how long, we don't know. If you can help with stuffing next Monday night, 23 Sep, 5.30 pm onwards, please do so as a lot of Southsiders are likely to drop out now that the move has been made. Till next time, Cheers Owen Coffee & Chat Home Page http://www.pcug.org.au/~rcook/c&c.htm
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