Washington Area Commodore User Group Minutes of the Board of Directors Meeting 21 February 1998 Members Present: Geof Goodrum, Lu Spriggs, Bob Mason, Jorn Dakin, Alex Goodale (serving as Secretary) Guest: Lee Huftalen Activities Since January Meeting: As there were no minutes available for the January Board meeting because of Bob Greep's absence, they were not reviewed. The Treasurer's Reports for January and February were reviewed and accepted. Treasurer Jorn Dakin explained that he had revised bookkeeping procedures as reflected in the reports, and was closing the books on 1997. The changes introduced by Jorn met with approval. Review of February Meeting: Attendance was 17--a little light, but not bad given the weather. Bob Mason provided the Disk Library Report, noting total proceeds of $57 (three 8-bit DOM, 13 PC DOM, and two MIDI sets). The meeting's substance didn't go exactly as planned, but nonetheless was quite successful. Our demonstrations of Partition Magic and X1541 fell through due to family issues, and Bob Mason was unable to find his stock of ferrite cores for protecting phone line equipment. However, Bob Mason, Alex Goodale, and Geof Goodrum once again chaired an open discussion of hard disk maintenance issues that we did not cover at January's Beginner's Day meeting. Lee Huftalen joined the "Experts Panel" to discuss the issues from the Amiga user perspective. We talked about disk fragmentation, disk utilities, disk partitioning, recovery disks, backup software, and virus protection. Plans for Future Meetings: For the 21 March meeting, in honor of upcoming Tax Day, the Board settled on a discussion of personal finance and tax packages, to be led by Alex Goodale. The meeting would also encompass Bob Mason's presentation of ferrite core kits for member consideration. For the April meeting, Bob Mason volunteered to give a demo of Windows 98, for which he is a beta tester. Other possibilities for the future included Paritition Magic, GoldMine 4.0, Netscape 4.0 and other Internet browsers, and personal information managers. Cursor: Alex Goodale reported that the February issue's production went quite smoothly, with everyone's input received on time. The deadline for the March issue is 1 March. By popular demand from the membership, Alex will rerun last year's series by Geof Goodrum on emergency recovery disks. The March issue will also be the last to include membership renewal announcements and the last mailed to members who fail to renew. Alex said that he had talked with Kathy Perrin about assuming Cursor editorial duties, and Kathy had reported that her new job was eating up too much time at the moment, but she hoped to see her way clear in four-six weeks. Other Business: Goef Goodrum handed out an updated membership list, and agreement was reached on contacting members who had not renewed. Geof also stated that he would arrange to transfer club e-mail access to Secretary Mike Ten-Kate. Then, he asked about volunteers to help share the load of various tasks he was still performing, such as meeting setup, the video display run on the club's Amiga, etc. Alex Goodale proposed to run the video display on the club's PC, to avoid having to cart in the Amiga, and volunteered to develop an appropriate strawman video slide presentation. In that regard, Jorn Dakin asked that, given the club's excellent financial state, whether we might want to invest in a laptop system, which would be far more convenient than the current desktop PC and Amiga. The Board agreed to consider this issue and return to it in future meetings for decision on specific purchases. The discussion also considered other capital purchases, such as Amiga hardware and the Fred Fish collection, which Lee Huftalen agreed to look into. Lee expressed an interest in resuming his leadership of WAC's Amiga members, to include preparing material for the Cursor. The Board welcomed his return to active status, but noted that he would need to renew his Club membership prior to formal readmission to the Board. Lee also expressed an interest in finding ways to appeal to computer gamers--not the club's strongest sector, but one where the Board agreed we could build greater strength, provided we did not neglect the interests of current members in the process.