Williamsport
Area Computer Club
Newsletter
& Meeting Minutes
March 2001
Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, April
10, at 7 PM, in the Winters
Room of the James V. Brown Library, 19 East Fourth
Street, Williamsport.
Our last meeting was opened at 7:18 PM Tuesday,
March 13 2001 by Vice-President Kathy Kolb.
Old Business:
- Jim received a request for hardcopy documentation about
our club from the JVB nonprofit organization assistance
center, and will send them the relevant information.
New Business:
- The club is grateful to newcomer Bob McHenry of Muncy for
his gracious donation of a monitor and two printers, one
new and all in complete working order. These are items
that our campaign to provide reconditioned equipment to
worthy causes is constantly in need of, so we're sure
they'll find a good home.
- There is a backlog of submissions for our Williamsport
Links page in Kathy's mailbox since Jim took over the
webmaster duties. Jim will try to find time to add them,
but plans to wait until his Alltel account is active
before changing the submission address.
- There is, however, no reason for people to still be
submitting additions to that page, since it contains a
note that it is being phased out in favor of the Susquehanna
Valley Community Net. Unfortunately, we never found
the time to verify the old list and migrate the entries
to the new one so that we could remove the page from our
site. Kathy is considering having one of her employees do
it.
- In an effort to attract new members, Jim is going to
place a classified ad in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette
several days prior to our next meeting.
- The mailing list has been moved from Sunlink's server to
ListBot. Jim is unhappy that ListBot has begun placing
ads at the top of subscribers' messages, rather
than at the bottom as other free services do. Jim would
be willing to move the list to a private for-pay server
if participation was higher. We are considering asking
Dan if he can host the list on the library's server.
- Robbie has compiled several pages of useful tips for
MS-DOS and Windows 98. We may use these as newsletter
filler from time to time. This month's tip: Pressing
SHIFT and DELETE with a file selected will delete a file
without moving it to the Recycle Bin.
- We are still in need of ideas for guest speakers and
programs. Two ideas suggested by the Kolbs are touring
Susquehanna Communications and touring WKSB, which is now
completely automated.
Discussion & News:
- Jim reported that he had received his DSL router from
Alltel and was eagerly awaiting service activation on the
20th. He noted that Alltel was quite thoughtful in
including a hardcopy of all necessary configuration
information rather than merely providing an automatic
installation disk as many modern ISPs do. This will be of
great use to him as he continues to move from Windows to
Linux. The local sales agent for Alltel is Bob Wagner.
- The Technology
Transfer Center at Penn College provides noncredit
courses, training, and certification in a variety of
modern computer topics.
- Microsoft is premiering a new training program in
Harrisburg.
- The Williamsport-Lycoming County Chamber of Commerce is
planning a Technology Achievement Awards for September or
October. This will be a one-day event to showcase
successful companies manufacturing, utilizing, or
educating about technology products in our area.
- Earthlink, who bought local ISPs Sunlink and Uplink, is
disappointing. Kathy noted that one customer, unhappy
with attempts to resolve an email problem by telephone,
drove to Sunlink's former office in Sunbury only to find
that it no longer existed. Jim experienced problems
sending mail to a certain category of Uplink users after
the recent conversion to Earthlink's network; the problem
was resolved after an email but no acknowledgement of the
problem was received for several weeks. Also, during an
IRC session he noticed that the dynamic domain name hints
that the "local" POP may now in fact be in
Wilkes-Barre.
- Last year, Geoffrey suggested that we look into turning
our then-large stockpile of old computers without
monitors into a Beowulf
parallel-processing machine. The obvious question then
became "what would we run on it?" Jim has
recently discovered the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory's cluster, built entirely with donated
equipment and used to run environmental simulations.
- Check out Junkyard
Wars on The Learning Channel and BattleBots
on Comedy Central for more fun hardware hacking projects.
- Speaking of hardware hacking, Jim recently rebuilt his
system (into a dual P3-700 running at 933 -- it'll do
1001 with one CPU) and was tired of reaching around the
back of it to switch his speakers and his headphones, so
he installed the FrontX
Port Extension. This useful gadget is a panel that
fits in a 5.25" drive bay and has sound and joystick
ports in the front with cables to lead through the
computer to the original ports on the back. It also has
an additional speaker port for the back of the case that
is cut off when headphones are plugged into the front
port. It's well worth the money.
Contact
Information
Home Page |
http://www.lycoming.org/wacc
|
Secretary |
Jim Shaffer, Jr., wacc@alltel.net
(Note new address!) |
Mailing List |
Send a message to wacc.chat-subscribe@listbot.com
or use the NEW form on our web page. (Note:
"wacc.chat" is correct.) This is an open list
for free-ranging local and computer-related discussions.
Anyone wishing to subscribe to the private (read-only)
newsletter list should email
us or use the form in the "comments"
section of our home page.
|