Good news! We’re finally going to start the Visual Basic SIG August 18^th. After some foot-dragging on my part, we have a classroom reserved at the Gateway Country Store on North Dale Mabry. This arrangement was made partly through the two Gateway employees Rich Podolsky and Beth Wood who gave us a very fine talk on Gateway last meeting.

One thing that I hadn’t realized was the sheer number of Gateway customers in our membership! And those who mentioned it were all very positive about the experience. Nice to know there are good recommendations out there among us.

I would expect when someone in the group buys something, be it a complete PC or a printer or whatever, that he or she would draw on the experience of other club members, and except for short discussions at the meeting, I don’t see much of that going on. We have the perfect forum for the exchange of information. All we have to do is use it – the discussion page on our web site. Won’t you please go there today and see what’s there? It really makes sense, and this is a perfect example of what a club is for – to post a message and title it "What’s the best scanner?" and see just how many responses you get. I’ll bet you would be surprised how much free information will be posted.

Even if you aren’t in the market for anything right now, if you’ll just scan the titles every day, you’ll be bound eventually to answer someone else’s question.

As my most recent contribution to the discussion page, I just started a discussion on Windows 98 tips that hopefully will grow as the members get going on Win98 upgrades. And look on pages 5 & 9 at the items on TerraServer! This is a database of satellite photos that you can get online. What fun I had using this, just finding my house on a photo taken from space! Thanks to William LaMartin who found this and posted it on the discussion group.

Also while you’re at the web site, you’ll notice some small changes William has been making to tidy up, including new background music. Read more about this on page 9.

So here’s the message from the pres… Use our web site as often as you can and come to the meetings or tell us why not – we want to know. See the e-mail addresses under officers.