[Glastonbury] report on meeting - Jan 10th

[Sean Miller]

Martin Wheeler wrote:

> Well, our first meeting in the new venue went well -- thanks Ray, 
> Phil, PeterL, Tony, Andrew (apologies from Ian and Greg).

I was meaning to come right up until the last minute, but I was just too 
shattered to go out again... spent the whole day doing some web work and 
was completely drained... apologies for that. I wanted to come and will 
definitely make next month's meeting.

> Checking out the new equipment was fun -- we have 14 machines at our 
> disposal, all P3 1000 MHz boxes, each with 256 Mb of memory -- all but 
> one with 20 Gb hard drive (the odd man out having 40 Gb) -- and all 
> booting up from the default settings of Ubuntu 5.10 no problem at all 
> -- straight onto the local network, and out to the internet.

Oh great!  That's going to be a lot of use in the future...

> Even better, with machines set to DHCP, just plugging into a network 
> socket enabled those who wanted to do so to plug their own machines into
> the network and so get out to the net with their own preferred 
> distribution -- whilst those with wireless enabled laptops found it 
> very easy to use the wireless network to get straight out onto the net 
> without needing to bring a CAT5 cable at all.

Even better !

> Two welcome differences to the usual routine:
> 1) the teabreak (thanks for thinking of bringing biscuits, Ray);
> 2) the ability to take our time over things, without feeling hounded 
> to get out for a deadline for someone else -- with the result that we 
> overran until 9:30+.  It's very nice to know that as keyholders, we 
> can leave when we feel like it.  A vast improvement, I feel.

That was one of my gripes with St. Dunstans, I have to admit... it could 
be rather traumatising trying to do installs and the like with the clock 
ticking as it was... sometimes these things take longer than planned and 
it is good to be able to relax on that front...

> The one note of sadness in the whole evening for me was the total 
> absence of any members from Glastonbury.  Whether this was by accident 
> or design, I do not know.  It would be sad to think that it was 
> intentional however.

Well, I'm now from Shepton but, as I said earlier, I did intend to 
come... will definitely be there next week... I know that Kelvin is 
spending quite a lot of time away from Glastonbury at present so that 
might be why he didn't make it... thinking about it, not sure that we 
have that many members from Glastonbury anymore... Tim, Kelvin, 
yourself... did Steve resign entirely, or is he just taking a sabbatical?

> As we have the run of the teaching room on a regular basis, it was 
> decided to try a *second* meeting each month -- this time on the 
> FOURTH Tuesday -- and to use this for teaching the LPI syllabus [q.v.] 
> in a slightly more formal setting.  A sort of 'Newbie Night' for 
> command-line beginners, as it were.  The first of these meetings will 
> be held on Tuesday, Jan. 24th, again at 19:00 - 21:00+

Ok, I shall try to make that one...

> (Somebody remember to bring coffee!  Non-teadrinkers almost died of 
> thirst tonight! :)

Lost your legs?!?!  Heritage is only a 5 minute walk up the road, and 
Morrisons is about the same.... lol !

Sean