[Herts] ** Plan For Future Meetings

[Malcolm Smith]

On Sat, Apr 15, 2006 at 11:56:00AM +0100, nicolas wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We had 5 people along to the last meeting. So we discussed the following
> plan. 
> 
> 1. Get a minimum of 12 people to pay £15 each up front for the next 12
> meetings. For everyone else it would be £2.50 on the door. 
> If we don't get 12 people their money is returned, and we return to the
> pub.
> 
Here's my 0.02p on Why I Come To HertsLUG.

The best thing I get out of the meetings is not necessarily the
formally pre-arranged talks, although some of them are very helpful;
for me the reason to attend is the discussions we end up getting
into which often lead into constructive directions. One good example
is Ian's mentioning of .htaccess files last week which allow you to
mirror/migrate websites at different URLs, by simply including a
.htaccess file in a website's root directory. See:

http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess7.shtml

For the impending migration of my website, I'll just put a file
called .htaccess consisting of just this line:

Redirect / http://www.thesmith.org.uk/

...into my root directory, and move the entire directory structure
over to the new server; browsers and Google's spiders will duly follow.

I would possibly not have known about this if I'd not been there and
talked about it.


For this reason, I'm prepared to pay upfront for the year, even if
I don't make it to any meetings (which I will, by the way - I'm
making a point of upping the priority of Linux in my life, giving
it a better nice value, so to speak... :-)

One thing I would like to get away from is random aimless talk, and
could we possibly leave discussion of Windows and other OT/non-free
subjects out of the picture?

In future I'll be giving talks on The GIMP, The BASH and possibly
some other four-letter words as I see fit.

I did suggest the idea of InstallFests to draw in more people, but it
was rightly pointed out that within our group we don't have many people
with much tech knowledge of hardware issues that would be needed to
answer all the FAQs and solve Joe Public's Skype connectivity issues.

I could send out a message to the LUSTy folk of LUton and ST. albans
HertsLUG inviting them along, since there is a distinct lack of any
meetings going on there - we have an unrivalled venue here, and it's not
that far away. What do you think on this? Would amalgamating the two
LUGs work in everyone's interest? There are also LUGs in Bedfordshire
and Milton Keynes which are other possibilities, so maybe having so
many tiny LUGs in the area is hindering us, and St. Albans is in
Hertfordshire after all. The name LUST rocks though... ;-)


> 2. If there was any surplus / deficit (i.e rent rise, but see point 4.)
> it would be divided between the founder members, or used to purchase LUG
> related materials/equipment.
> 
> 3. The objective is not to make any profit, just to cover costs.
>  
Fifteen quid is hardly a great deal of money.


> 4. We would attempt to book the room 12 months in advance, IF at all
> possible.
> 
> What do you think?  
> 
> Regards
> Nicolas

Cheers
-- 
Malc 
http://www.canopus22.demon.co.uk/