Hello
there...
Hello
there...
Everyone must get fed up with me constantly repeating, "it's been another busy month" - well it has. Probably not a lot to be seen on the surface (except the new broadband plans), but as usual, a lot bubbling along underneath.
END of FY BLUES: I wish I could announce that we will have 'electronic' payments available this week - unfortunately not. But I am really hopeful that they will happen this month. It's (as usual) a chain of events, each depending on another along the way. It started with our deciding to change our bank from the Commonwealth to St. George, diverted via BPAY numbers, via the use of MYOB and the need to get end of FY numbers etc......
Enough said - I am beginning to feel that we are almost there. We have a big incentive to get this going, Not only to offer the membership more convenient methods to pay, but also to reduce the telephone workload on the office staff.
CENTRE BUILDING MODIFICATIONS: Once again a chain of interrelated events. We would dearly love to restart some training courses, and would like to get the training systems networking reinstalled to allow that to happen. But laying out the networking plan is dependant on internal layout. The layout may vary depending upon if we get approval for some building modifications from Urban services. Getting that approval was dependant on getting some good drawings made of our proposals and quotes from builders etc. I think we can finally see some light at the end of the tunnel. John Hodge, one of our great volunteers, has done some very good drawings and if finalising the 'statement of work'. Another member, Allan Baden, is a builder who has volunteered to supervise the demolition work when we hope to have another massive 'working bee' and do the job in one day with luck. Rod Peters (the Centre technical manager) has made many furniture/work station layouts and network plans. So, finally thanks to these efforts, the whole interrelated sequence is about to move into a higher gear. In the meantime we have some members who are keen to run some small workshops/courses, so we are going to 'lash-up' a network and get down to some action at last. But students/participants will need to realise that there may be people wandering through the class from time to time and facilities may not be perfect.....
TROJANS, VIRI and SPYWARE: As usual - lots of it around. The latest include an old chestnut - the ultimate security update to all Microsoft products - just click on the attachment.....
There have also been quite a few messages with nasty attachments purporting to come from one jsaxon@optusnet.com.au (needless to say I have never had an Optusnet address). Some of these have even appeared in my mailbox {:-)) Quick work by the TIP admins tracked the source to one of our members who was infected and has been asked to clean up his system and to cease, and desist, plus much anti-virus and anti-Spyware advice.
It is almost impossible to stop this type of thing happening without draconian server filtering which would quite possibly prevent many legitimate messages reaching our members. So as usual - be careful out there... Any attachment is suspect!
That said - we may be starting to send some invoices and receipts from MYOB finance software which does not seem capable of doing this via plain text Email and it uses an Acrobat PDF file attachment! If this is really the case, then we will ensure that we will use some very obvious methods to indicate the content of these Emails are genuine and announce it to all in advance.
MMM (Main Monthly Meeting): If you missed this month's meeting - once again you missed a good one. Two very different subjects and both fascinating as far as I am concerned.
The first was Deborah Bayley from Voice Perfect demonstrated the latest Dragon Naturally Speaking program. I never did learn to type as (apart from laziness) I had this crazy belief that computers are meant to serve us - we should not have to learn special ways of communicating with them! So Deborah had the very brave idea of demonstrating controlling the computer with voice commands, dictation into Word and Excel without pre-training the system. Despite some technical problems due to the public address system in the theatre - I found the demonstration most impressive. I have also persuaded Deborah to install the program on my system at home, and by next month's magazine, I hope to have a genuinely unbiased user review ready. Naturally Speaking have kindly agreed to a 10% discount for our members which means that the Preferred version would be $340 and the professional version $1350. See http://www.voiceperfect.com.au/ for more information.
That was a hard act to follow - but Mike Boesen managed to do that really well with his fine demonstration of some of the many features of Google's Picasa2 digital image organisation software. Mike wrote a great article on this software in "16 Bits" magazine for April 2005 see http://www.pcug.org.au/members/16bapr05/ and cleared up a couple of items in the May issue. But there is nothing like seeing the real thing in action and Mike did that so well that I have been inspired to download and install the latest version from Google at http://picasa.google.com/ Wish I had time to really do some serious organising.
Mike has added more on Picasa2 this month.
Talking of the MMM. You may have noticed that August's meeting has not yet been advertised on the web pages. This is because we were waiting for confirmation of a rather special event. The official announcement of the Canberra Times 'Silicon Kid's' web site hosted by the PCUG on TIP. The web site will contain a searchable database of all the SK's 1200 plus problems and solutions. Matthew 'the kid' will be demonstrating the site at the August meeting and joining some of the group 'gurus' to answer some of your problems. So jot down one or two of your problems (everyone has some :-) and come along to what should be a super meeting on Tues 2nd August.
All the best - John Saxon
17 Jul 2005