By Don Patzsch, Tampa PC Users Group
patzsch@helios.acomp.usf.edu

At Kissimmee, Florida March 5, 6, and 7, 2004, over 150 people attended the Spring Regional Conference of the Florida Association of Computer User Groups. This represents 35 groups from around Florida, some Mac, some PC and Linux occasionally, also.

On Friday night, we register for the Conference and each person is issued a cloth bag of goodies and vendors’ brochures. Refreshments were available (free, of course), and we break into small groups to get together with the "regulars" from all over the State, whom we've met at previous meetings.

Every city has an interesting story to tell. Kissimmee, Florida is no exception. In 1881 Hamilton Disston signed a 1 million dollar IOU to the State of Florida. He bought four million acres at 25 cents an acre, and he immediately sold two million acres to Dutch capitalists to get the money to pay for all four million acres! There is more to the story, but let's get back to the FACUG and its president, Larry Tyler, who sets up the Kissimmee Civic Center space and also a motel agreement so we may stay in Kissimmee at a special rate. Larry and his helpers do a great job each year.

On Saturday morning, Smart Computing sponsored the breakfast. Marcie described the various magazines they produce and told us how to access all the articles in all the magazines online and for free. Smart Computing and its sister magazines are written in simple English so that even a novice may read them easily. PC Today, CE, and CPU are some of the magazines they produce. All have their articles on the website and all are available to you as a subscriber to Smart Computing. (The one I take.)

The second session we chose was the APCUG workshop, by Peggy Ireland and Steve Morgan. Florida has the most user groups. California is second. Some groups did not know you do not have to be a member of FACUG in order for your group to join the APCUG. APCUG will host your website, and makes up a listserv. Your user group may make up a member list so that you may send to one location and have the email go to all your members. We attend these sessions so we may stay abreast of what the folks at APCUG are thinking and doing this year. Go to http://www.webboard.apcug.org.

After the second session is lunch. Intel sponsored this lunch. Dave Whittle was the spokesman. Dave told us about the Centrino chips for laptops and how the Pentium 4 lets Windows see two processors at once. There is a seminar available on CD re: Centrino, Pentium 4, and Digital Home. Try http://www.intel.com/go/pcug Dave will provide articles for newsletters.

The next session was on new developments in digital photography. This is the type of session that makes us all excited and interested in coming to these conferences. Rod Scher gave us a real insight into how to set your camera for depth of focus and the time of the lens opening. He presented some neat tables to illustrate his talk. He discussed the optical vs. digital zoom.

The next session we took in was Smart Computing. Marcie described the advantages the company provides for user groups: free magazines, permission to print articles in newsletters, and some information that duplicated her talk at the breakfast event.

Next, the vendors were asked to sit as a group and let the audience ask questions. Later each vendor was given a table and anyone could visit with them or buy their products.

Dinner was sponsored by Microsoft. Alan Chitlik did photos inside email, and he stitched some photos together.

Sunday breakfast was sponsored by Jasc. The program Paint Shop Pro v 8 was shown and demonstrated ably. This whole conference was dominated by photography.

Our first session was given by Alan, and he described the Microsoft music format, and copying CD music and labels. He told us that digital video requires about 198 megs per minute. His topic was, "What Alan wants to show you." Good presentation and some duplication of his other talks.

Our last session was Communicating by Dave Gerber of the Sarasota PC group. He gave us a handout and described how they get around the limit of 100 email messages. One of their people, Forrest, wrote a program so they can send email to each of 1,400 members real fast. Other clubs may use their service for $5 per month. Go to http://www.SPCUG.org.

Adobe sponsored the Sunday lunch. Dave Helmly showed us the latest Adobe Photoshop Magic. Adobe is a unique company. It would take a great deal of space to go through Dave's presentation. Most of us were thoroughly surprised at the one click changes you may make in your photos.