President’s Message

Last reminder, everyone. The election of officers is close at hand. Won’t you step up and volunteer for a job? Contact Bruce Register at bregis@gte.net.

Talk to any officer about this. Find out what the jobs entail. Come to a board meeting to look it over and see if there’s anything of interest for you.

Do you know anyone who’d like to come to a meeting to look our club over? You’re a member, so you believe the club is worthwhile, and if you know anyone, friend, neighbor, spouse or family, invite them and help the club grow.

Our Visual Basic SIG is going just great. The interest in the group is as strong as ever. There is room for a few more, so if you’d like to look it over to see what we’re doing, send me an email; I’ll send the meeting times and a reminder to you.

You may be thinking of Christmas presents to yourself. I’ve been using my scanner to reproduce photos quite a lot. We’ve also been creating our own greeting cards and placing family photos on them. The results are just spectacular. If you’re thinking of getting a scanner, you couldn’t pick a better time, price-wise. Look for a SCSI or USB model if you can afford the $50 higher cost. Also, as I found out the hard way, it takes a pretty decent PC with plenty of memory. I’m thinking of increasing mine to 128MB, when I can get some loose money. 32MB was inadequate, so I upgraded to 64MB when I built my current PC. When I pull up a large photo scanned at 600x600, my PC does the job, but very, very slowly.

A true photo-quality printer is still a $300 item, although if you are willing to accept somewhat reduced quality, you can save quite a lot. Look at the current PC magazine for a complete review of printers. Hewlett-Packard and Epson are still the front runners in inkjet models. They also give the Alps printer good marks.