February 6, 2009
The meeting was called to order at 7:31 P.M. by President Chuck Horner.
SIG Announcements:
Paul Cooper introduced the new Smarter Computing SIG. It’s purpose is to explore various topics of general (computing) interest. It will meet on the 2nd Tuesday of each month from 7:00 to 9:00 P.M. in the Music Room at Hayward Adult School. This month they will look at Podcasting. Bring a laptop if you have one.
Bud Gallagher started off by announcing that Microsoft has opened a site called FixIt, where the aforenamed company is promising to help us fix our computers.
Bud is permanently retiring the New User SIG. He is contemplating a Windows 7 SIG instead. Next month he will tell us the meeting particulars–day, time, location. For a very short time, the Windows 7 beta will be available online. Among other tidbits: there is no direct upgrade from XP.
Jan Fagerholm reported that in January Verne Perry presented Ubuntu at the Spectacular Linux SIG. This month, they may look at virtualization, or something else if there is an interesting release.
Other Announcements:
There will be a cookout at the Clubhouse tomorrow.
Presentations:
Bayle Emlein presented ZoomWare from Ai Squared. ZoomWare is a utility that has several functions to make your computer screen more readable. Users can adjust screen background color, cursor size and color, and mouse size and color as well as the amount of screen magnification. Ai Squared also makes ZoomText, which has more features (such as screen reading and up to 36x magnification) and costs several times as much. Use code CUGREV for a 20% discount on ZoomWare.
Jan spoke briefly about the variety of netbooks now available. Another term for the device is Ultra MobilePC: UMPC. These were inspired by the the One Laptop Per Child OLPC) educational project. The government of Peru found that distributiing books and materials via an OLPC computer costs approximately 1/3 as much as using the traditional paper technology–including infrastructure and maintenance.
Members are encouraged to bring their netbooks to the Main Meeting so that we can compare features.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:55 P.M.
The next meeting will take place at the same location on March 6, 2009.
Respectfully submitted,
Bayle Emlein, Secretary
