[Glastonbury] tomorrow's meeting

[Martin Wheeler]

Have just tried to post something to the lugog site, using mambo, but it 
keeps telling me I'm not authorised to post news.  (Whether I'm logged in 
as a user or not.)  So could we have something simpler please, that we can 
all use to post news and messages to the site, without going into the 
forum?  Mambo is very pretty, but if we can't use it to post stuff to the 
front page of the site, the game's not worth the candle.


I've been trying to get round to replying to all sorts of mails since early 
December, but haven't really got anywhere, so am going to have to pack 
everything into this one mail.

Firstly, I agree with something Peter Fry said, along the lines of having 
slightly more structure to the meetings.  It has worried me quite a bit 
that at the last few meetings we just seem to have ambled along, with no 
plan, program or structure to the meeting -- which is all well and good, 
but a bit frustrating for those who are waiting on the sidelines for the 
main event to happen.

So I suggest that as from tomorrow, we adopt a *slightly* more structured 
approach -- first 45 mins for general gassing, swapping tips'n'tricks, 
fixing individual members' problems in the usual meandering fashion.  Next 
60 mins devoted to a prepared talk (in this case, me; nattering on about 
'Using Linux as an SGML editing workstation'; followed by 15 mins 
questions and clear-up.

Comments, anyone?

Further, I agree with remarks made by Sean -- the old meeting room (T1) 
was much better suited to our type of meetings than the present room, 
which is cramped and has no real worksurfaces suitable for taking notes, 
putting equipment on (e.g. laptops), etc.  Not looking a gift-horse in the 
mouth, mind you, but really would prefer to be back in T1, if at all 
possible.
Steve?

For example, my talk tomorrow will depend heavily on stuff already 
installed on my laptop -- which I know works beautifully with the LCD 
projector in T1.
However, December's meeting showed that it *won't* work with the projector 
in the current room.  In which case, we may have a problem tomorrow night.
What do other members think about setting up a liaison committee to 
liaise with the school authorities on points like this , so it isn't 
always Steve's job?

Again, comments anyone?

And finally, an idea which I wanted to put forward sometime in November / 
December, and never got round to, which was then slightly pushed aside by
other events -- which was to suggest a mid-monthly meeting as well, but 
during the winter months only, to cater for those newcomers to Linux who 
want to learn about using the command line, and other non-Windows ways of 
thinking.  Thus, during Oct. Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb. & March we would have a 
second meeting on the third Wednesday of the month, devoted purely to 
helping newcomers learn the sort of stuff that those of us who've been 
using Linux for yonks just take for granted, without even thinking about 
it.  (Recent list discussion on use of digikam, etc. has made me realise 
how different my own personal approach to this sort of thing is -- purely 
because of the way I grew up in this environment -- where I would 
never dream of looking for an application to unload pictures from a 
camera, but would do it step by step, from first principles. [Connect 
camera; mount camera as a device; look at memory contents of camera; copy 
those contents to hard drive; then massage those contents using something 
like the gimp -- etc.]  In fact, it took this discussion to apprise me of 
the fact that there *were* ready-made applications I could use to do this 
job.  It's just a different attitude to seeing the problem.  When I was 
faced with the same problem, I didn't even think of looking for an app. to 
do what I wanted -- I did the only thing I knew how to do, according to my 
personal experience.  Now, sessions where we all exchange ideas of the 
differing ways to do things (there are always at lest three different ways 
of doing anything under Linux) would, I feel, be beneficial to all.


So -- having got through all that -- what's the topic for February then?
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
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