Williamsport Area Computer Club

Newsletter & Meeting Minutes

September 2000

Our next meeting will be held on Tuesday, October 10, at 7 PM, in the Winters Room of the James V. Brown Library, 19 East Fourth Street, Williamsport.

Clyde Phillips from Compu-Gen will speak about Windows ME.

Members please note that nominations for offices for election in November will be accepted at this time.

Our last meeting was called to order by Vice-President Kathy Kolb on September 12, 2000. Treasurer John Yarosz reported that the Club held $612.65 and that the account was now at Northern States Bank.

Committee Actions:

Advertising / Awareness / Public Relations / Home Page:

• Robbie is moving our web site to http://www.lycoming.org/wacc and Jim will be given access to edit the pages. Redirection links will eventually be placed on our Sunlink pages.
• Kathy had copies of the club poster, including the new URL, made at Staples, and we authorized that the $7.42 cost would be paid from the treasury. Geoff and Mike will be asked to help distribute the posters to local businesses.
• John suggested that we approach local retailers about a discount for club members. However, there are probably not enough of us to make this worthwhile.
• Kathy announced that our November guest speaker will be Rob Colley from Hoyer's Photo, with a presentation about digital video cameras and digital editing technology.
• Geoff is still trying to get Richard M. Stallman of the Free Software Foundation to come to Williamsport.

Computer Recycling (finding charitable uses for old computers):

Robbie is taking our outdated systems apart for disposal of any unusable parts.

Computer / Internet News:

• The Williamsport/Lycoming Chamber of Commerce has designated October as Technology Awareness Month. Scheduled events include:
  • October 14: Business and Technology Resource Center Open House, 5-8 PM, 2401 Reach Road, Williamsport. Tours will be given of local high-tech businesses.
  • October 19: Techxpo.00, 9:30 AM - 5 PM, Penn College Field House. Demonstrations of various new technologies.
• On October 24th, Kathy will be speaking at a seminar at the E-Commerce Resource Center in Scranton.
• Kathy and Dan were discussing the pervasiveness of Microsoft certification requirements, and the fact that books and testing can be very expensive. As a result, they are starting a local MCSE study group. Contact Dan Yoas at the library if you are interested.

Open Discussion:

• Dan brought in a CueCat for the group to look at. This interesting(?) device is a bar code scanner that allows the user to visit a variety of web sites automatically by scanning codes printed in Radio Shack catalogs and Parade magazine. It will also work with UPC and ISBN codes if they have been included in the company's database.
• PC Parts, who formerly held auctions of large amounts of surplus computer components locally, is now known as Keystone State Auctioneers and can be found online at www.keystoneauctioneers.com.

Program:

Muriel Hykes gave an informal talk about her experience with online stock trading. She uses a free program called Stockview which allows her to organize stocks in folders and provides alerts when prices go above or below levels she selects. She has also found that Yahoo has the best stock charts, providing historical data from one day to the entire lifetime of the company. Also, Kathy Kolb pointed out that fantasy stock-trading games, available at various places such as Yahoo and C|Net, are useful as a learning experience because they use real data but don't cost you any money.