SCOUG OS/2 For You - November 1998

We knew going in that October was going to be a busy month for SCOUG, but it turned out to be even more eventful than anticipated. Our monthly meeting was held one week early and featured Chris Graham's talk on his OS/2 utilities package. It was well received and Chris stayed on to address the programming SIG and join us for (a rather loud) lunch after the meeting (competing with college football and baseball playoffs).

The reason for the earlier club meeting, of course, was that Warpstock '98 was scheduled for the following weekend in Chicago. The official attendance was never completely disclosed but estimates put it at over 300 attendees and 25 or so vendors, one of which was SCOUG - and our booth was quite successful. Thanks to the all the help from Steve Schiffman, Melanie Chernoy and Lynn Maxson (not to mention backup from Rollin, Carla and Randell). We took in about $900 in sales including 19 (count them 19!) memberships (mostly new members plus a few renewals from those who joined at last years Warpstock), t-shirts, sweatshirts and our Open House CDs. All in all, the weekend went well and it felt good to look down the exhibit room aisles and see all those monitors displaying the OS/2 desktop.

WebFoot was busy quacking with everyone (and receiving special awards such as his very own duck family); even though Warpstock was indoors (and prehaps in honor of WebFoot), we were still allowed to experience the fresh rain from outside thanks to major leaks in the hotel roof fifteen stories above; the presentations were well attended and the Saturday night raffle went on (and on and on) smoothly. I guess the one big disappointment was the instability of the networking which prevented us from accomplishing our CUSeeMe feeds and even made the scheduled IRC chats from our booth largely ineffective; hopefully this will be given a higher priority at future Warpstocks.

After all the excitement and intensity of Warpstock, a reality check hit after returning as we learned that OCIPUG, our SIG space hosts, had been forced to make a decision to sublease the office rooms used for their (and our) SIG meetings, due to financial constraints. Starting at the end of October, those offices are no longer available for our meetings. As a result, a number of alternatives are being evaluated for the SIG meetings and the help desk ranging from finding other, equally suitable, locations for these activities to combining the meetings back into the Saturday schedule. More will be posted as these decisions are finalized; as always, inputs are welcome.

Short term effects are that the Internet and Networking SIGs will not meet in November and December; the Internet SIG will cohost the General Interest SIG presentation on IRC at the November main meeting. In the following weeks we will also be experimenting with weekly online IRC chats and will post the schedule and chat content on our website when available. We will also continue to test/refine the CUSeeMe software and hope that the OS/2 driver becomes more stable in future releases.

The help desk will also not formally meet in November. A new help line will be added to our website to which anyone can post OS/2-related questions and problems. Appropriate responses/solutions to these problems will be provided by those monitoring this "list." For more persistent problems which cannot be adequately addressed in this manner, we will try to provide house calls by our "experts" to give further assistance.

What else? Actually, that's probably enough for one month so we'll look forward to a "quiet" November (even the board meeting won't be until the first week in December due to Thanksgiving commitments). See you on all at the meeting on Nov 21st.

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