Williamsport Area Computer Club

Newsletter / Meeting Minutes

June/July 1999

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, August 10, 1999, at 7 PM, at Sovereign Bank, 33 West Third Street, Williamsport. We will be having a presentation about online banking. All meetings are free and open to the public.

Our last meeting was called to order at 7:15 PM on June 8, 1999 by President John Yarosz. Attendance was very light. The minutes of May's meeting were approved. In Dan's absence, there was no treasurer's report.

Committee Reports:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

• Kathy has had more business cards printed for the club, including her phone number for contact.
• The club "For Sale" page has been deleted from our web site due to lack of activity.
• In light of the sudden and ongoing increase in requests for addition to the newsletter mailing list, Jim is going to poll new subscribers regarding where they found referral to our home page.

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

• We donated three 486 systems and three portable 386 systems to the Penn Vale literacy project.
• The Salvation Army has requested a system.
• We have one 486 system and a number of 286 systems left.
• We still need someone to volunteer to repair VGA monitors.

Computer Show:

• The show will be held on September 18th from 9 AM to 2 PM.
• Pricing will be $25 per table, or $20 if you bring your own table. Admission will be $3, or $5 for tailgating.
• The Williamsport Parking Authority has agreed to let us use the parking deck for free! We still need to check the availability of electrical outlets.
• We are going to pay Susquehanna Communications $168 for 56 ads on ZDTV the week before the show. There will also be an approximately $100 production fee.
• Advertising on The Weather Channel would cost $84. We probably won't be doing this.
• There may not be any time available on WRAK, but the show will be promoted on WKSB and WMYL.
• The color posters that Kathy designed are ready for distribution to announce the event. We are going to put up posters at the parking deck.
• Members are asked to promote our show at any hamfests or computer events they attend.
• Suggestions for special programs for the show are still needed.
• Dues need to be paid up! Our largest single cost this year will be for insurance ($275 last year.)

Computer News and Miscellaneous Discussions:

• Kathy reported that rural ISPs are now valued at $1200 per subscriber.
• PCS Powernet has a $139 per year plan.
• John reported that US Netway was bought by Nu-net from Bethlehem PA, and MMI is their local sales agent.
• Robbie wanted to know whether it was possible to save a copy of a RealAudio stream. Nobody has heard of a way to do this, but Jim noted that many small website operators will simply place RealAudio-encoded files on their site instead of running a streaming server, and these can be downloaded as with any other file.
• John wanted to know whether screen resolution affects printout size. This depends on the application program and on the printer driver, but there are usually options to scale the output.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:22 PM, with a note that there will be no meeting in July but members are welcome to gather at Benjies restaurant at the usual time.

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