March 2005 Minutes

For the Tuesday meeting, a group of 12 to 15 of us met at Valentino's for pizza and business.

First we appointed a new president and vice president--Kevin Neff and Steve Fox, respectively. Jim Evans is still left holding the Bag :) I (Kevin) am fairly new to the part of the group that attends meetings, so I included a mug shot of me and my basement. If you're interested in presenting for future meetings, talk to me or Steve.

Secondly, we addressed meeting times, frequency, etc. The group came to the consensus that a formal meeting should be held at the Heinz Center once each month, rotating between Tuesday and Thursday of the second week. This plan is tentative; the usual meeting dates and times will be observed until I verify that the room is open and the web site is updated. We agreed that this meeting should be held at 6:00 PM.

The lunch schedule will not change. However, an informal social event will be held on a random evening each month. We did not decide how the social event would be arranged. Unless there are any better ideas, I think we should decide when and where at each monthly meeting.

Finally, there was a great deal of discussion about boot camp. The feeling I had as I left the meeting was that we were leaning toward using a live CD for a Saturday session and then inviting people to our next meeting For those who came to our monthly meeting, we would help people with their questions and maybe do some installations.

The actual schedule for the boot camp (the Saturday session) was not decided, but it looks like we're going to do 50 min presentations and limit the instruction to a total of 4 hours. The thought here is that there could be multiple short presentations during the same hour, or a long presentation. Also, there will be a need for assistants to help people who fall behind in the demos.

Steve Fox, who has agreed to organize the boot camp, said that he wants to reach a computer literate audience. We all agreed that Grandma and Grandpa probably were not going to come, so we could breeze through a lot of the basics in a "desktop tour" in the first hour.

Other possible topics are listed below. Which topics are eventually picked depend on what Steve thinks are important and who is willing to make a presentation. Send e-mail to Steve about what topics you'd like to present. Remember, this will only happen if people are involved. To encourage people to assist us in the boot camp effort, I will buy a round for the first presenter to commit and the first to people who volunteer for a non-presenting role.

The next KLUG activity is lunch on Thursday, Match 17. The next meeting time is Thursday, March 24 at 7:00 PM (the usual time). We will announce the new meeting schedule at the March 24 meeting.

  0. Desktop Tour
  1. Email Clinet Configuration
  2. Printer Configuration
  3. Camera Basics
  4. PDA Synchronization
  5. Samba
  6. AVI & DVD Viewing
  7. USB Devices & Drives
  8. Burning CDs
  9. MP3 Basics
 10. Instant Messaging (AIM, Yahoo, IRC, etc)
 11. Web Browsing (Flash, Java, etc)