Meeting Preview: Christmas Party and Election of officers. As usual, Mary Sheridan will conduct a computing and Windows discussion for the first 30 minutes of the meeting. Perhaps she will also tell us about COMDEX.

President's Message

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

As the year draws to a close, I'd like to thank each and every one of you for giving me the chance to serve as your president. It’s been a great opportunity for me to meet and get to know many wonderful people. I hope I've benefited the user group, and I look forward to being involved in the future wherever I might be needed.

I’d also like to extend a great big thank you to everyone who volunteers their time and effort to make our user group an educational and worthwhile experience.

Kevan and I just returned from a week in Las Vegas where we attended the APCUG Fall Conference and COMDEX. The conference was a huge success. The primary function of the APCUG conference is to help user group leaders learn ways to make their user groups the best organizations possible. Steve Ballmer had dinner with us and gave a funny, informative and interesting talk. It was much easier to sit through than Bill Gate's keynote speech at Comdex. The round table sessions at the APCUG conference were about getting new members, forming SIGs, and getting people to advertise in your newsletter, just to mention a few of the topics. It was a valuable learning experience, and I hope I’m able to disseminate the information in order to enhance our group.

Microsoft had a rather large presence at Comdex. They had partnered with a slew of vendors who use Windows and it made for a large part of the show. I was disappointed at the lack of innovations this year. Most of the technology has been around for a while and the new things, like the Handspring Treo (a pager, cell phone and PDA combination) are just being rolled out without many of the bugs being worked out. The Treo is a good example because it sounds like a great idea until you find that only two companies are capable at this time of handling the GSM cellular network. Once it becomes mainstream, then it will be a lot more appealing to me. I was also expecting much better pricing at the event and saw the only real deals were those offered through the user groups via APCUG.

I’d like to note that without being a member of the FACUG and the APCUG, it would be nearly impossible to get decent speakers to come to our meetings. And, as software and hardware vendors tighten their belts, we need to realize that the software donations to our raffle will become less and less.

But, on a more positive note, our membership is up and we have more money at the end of this year than at the end of last year, so it looks like we’re in pretty solid shape.

Thanks again for letting me be your president. I hope to see many of you at the Christmas Party.

Happy Computing! u