Meeting Preview: At the June meeting we will have a presentation on Linux by Bill Preece of the Suncoast Linux User Group (http://www.suncoastlug.org/). Mary Sheridan, as usual, will conduct a 30-minute Windows discussion at the beginning of the meeting.

President’s Message

By Mary Sheridan, President, Tampa PC Users Group
mcpease@mindspring.com

Half of the year 2000 is already gone and half of my year as President. I’m enjoying it, and I hope I’m doing a good job

We went to ITEC (Information Technology Exposition and Conference) at the Convention Center recently. It wasn’t as large as I had expected, but it was interesting nonetheless. I met the President of the Tampa Bay Computer Society, Dave "Doc" Dockery. The group is headquartered in Clearwater and meets at the Clearwater Central Catholic High School. They had a table for the event, and Doc said that people were asking if there was a group in Tampa. He was giving them our web address. The following day I took our brochures down there, and they handed them out for us. What an amazingly philanthropic thing for them to do. I want to extend a great big "Thank You" to them and hope we can find some way to repay them in the future.

The garage/rummage sale with the Greater Tampa Bay Computer User Group (Brandon) for this summer has been postponed until December. MOSI has some old equipment they would like to sell, also. This sale will enable all of us to clean out some of those old components and software and help the user group at the same time. We decided it would be better to have the sale after the "Snowbirds" return for the winter.

The presenter at the next meeting (June 14th) will be Bill Preece. He plans to talk about the Linux operating system, and I’m looking forward to hearing what he has to say.

We are in need of a projector for meetings in other rooms at MOSI and at the SIGs. Merle Nicholson has started a projector fund. He generously made the first pledge to get the ball rolling, and Bruce Register was next to pledge. Thanks to both of them and everyone else who is able to help out. Mike Hodges has some older projectors that can hopefully be used as "trade-ins". This should lower the cost of the projector. Let’s all pull together and make this a successful project.

I’ve gotten a couple of phone calls this month from people looking for beginner computer classes. If anyone has ideas of how to serve the needs of new PC users, please let me know. Most people seem to be intimidated by our regular meetings, so we may need to have a beginners’ SIG. Any thoughts on this subject will be welcome.

I got an invitation to the Fall APCUG Conference in Las Vegas during Comdex week. My response was, NO, I cannot think about November yet! I do well to know where I might be next week.

Thanks to everyone for continuing to support the group. u