Trevor has handed me the task of compiling the magazine this month and I am thoroughly enjoying it, though it is certainly time consuming at my level of HTML competence. Still, I am learning as I go and I appreciate how much more relaxed I am than when I made up my home page. I still have a long way to go. Trevor provided me with a well padded skeleton of the magazine and enough suporting material to provide for good pickings.  Perhaps when I go to Queensland on my customary winter sabbatical and refrain from writing for a month or two I will upgrade the home page.

I have been a member of the PCUG since 1986, and seen its growth and decline. Its growth was explosive and its decline has been one of attrition as members moved from our ISP, TIP - (The Internet Project) - to more appealing providers, and taken their membership with them. Many of us who have retained our membership over the years realise that there is more to PCUG than just its ISP. Which, incidentally, was the first commercial ISP in Canberra and celebrates its tenth anniversary this month, February 2005. The Coffee and Chat Special Interest Group and several other SIGs are proof of that. But there may be another underlying cause for our steady decline - the effort needed to maintain the group. It really has been an onerous task for a lot of people, and still is. Why? Because for most of its existence we never had a paid member of staff, and even now I think we have only one. Volunteers have been the backbone of the group, and without them it would never have been born and grown to a healthy maturity. Volunteers come in a number of guises and wear a variety of hats, some of them more than one. They range through tutors, staffers at the PCUG Centre, contributors to the magazine, helpers in libraries and homes, book-keepers, and the TIP admins who, at great personal inconvenience and tremendous patience, maintain the equipment and fight the paper battles that have kept us afloat. They deserve an accolade of thanks for their perseverance and dedication to our cause. We need more like them.

The committee has great plans to extend services to our members and, hopefully, increase our membership again. It will not be easy if the burden falls on a relative few. Believe it or not, all of you have skills that could be gainfully employed in the group at little inconvenience to yourselves, and with a gratifying return in seeing a job well done. I would like to welcome more reviewers into the fold to research and filter the abundance of software being offered to us for review, and consequently being gifted to the group. There is great satisfaction in completing a review that gets the author's approval or even praise, and can have the additional reward to the reviewer of a free copy of the program. I am really thankful to see the response to my appeal  for willing hands capable of rendering help, either by phone or home visit, to new and struggling members as is one of the aims of this committee. I know the president, John Saxon, can allocate tasks in a variety of fields to almost anyone who is willing to come forward. Why not stand up to be counted and become more involved in creating a more vibrant group?

Enjoy your computing.        Terry Bibo