Hello Region 5

1. Board Elections
2. Contest Winners
3. Name That User Group
4. Database Update
5. Regional Specific

1.Board Elections

At the Board of Directors Meeting, Kathy Jacobs was elected to be APCUG’s newest Vice-President.
The Board now consists of:

President – Jay Ferron
Vice-President – Kathy Jacobs
Secretary – Linda Moore

2. Contest Winners

Remember, these are national awards.

Contest Winners – The APCUG announced to the User Groups in December, 2008 that it was sponsoring a APCUG Newsletter, Web and Photo Contest. The contest ran from January 1st through January 31st. We also announced that the contest was to be managed differently in that all submissions would be posted to the APCUG SharePoint site. Additionally, we also eliminated the user group size as part of the judging criteria for the Newsletter and Web submissions. Judges were selected in February.

You can see all the entries just by logging into SharePoint and look under Shared Documents/APCUG 2009 Newsletter, Web and Photo Contests. There were 15 Newsletter entries, 22 web entries and 97 Photo entries.
The APCUG board extends its thanks to the judges Judy Taylour, Charlotte Semple (Newsletter), Doris Collins, Patty Lowry (Web), Don Singleton and Paula Sanders (Photo) who graciously donated their time and energy in selecting the winners.

Newsletter

• 1st Place – Boca Raton Computer Society, Florida
• 2nd Place – The Personal Computer Club of Connecticut
• 3rd Place – BPCA News, Broward Personal Computer Association, Inc., Florida

Web

• 1st Place – Quad-Cities Computer Society (www.qcs.org)
• 2nd Place – The PC Users Group of CT (http://tupcug-ct.org)
• 3rd Place (3 way tie)
  Tucson Computer Society (http://www.aztcs.org)
  Temecula Valley Computer User Group (http://www.tvcug.org)
  PC Community (http://www.pcc.org)

Photo Contest

A. People

• 1st Place: Edge of Light –
  Phil Ball-
  Prescott Computer Society
• 2nd Place: Seeing You …
  Tanya L Mattson-
  Computer Users of Erie
• 3rd Place: Engineer….
  Josh Cockey-
  Fredericksburg PC Users Group

B. Animals

• 1st Place: Cormorant-
  Barry Rimmer-
  Lake-Sumter Computer Society
• 2nd Place: GreenHeron –
  Linda B. Boyatzies-
  Northern Neck Computer Users Group
• 3rd Place: GreatBlueHeron-
  Linda B. Boyatzies-Northern Neck Computer Users Group

C. Landscape (which the rules define as: Landscape can be mountains, sky, sea, flowers, desert, trees, etc.)

• 1st Place: Windy Day-
  Richard Davis-
  Northern Neck Computer Users Group
• 2nd Place: Morning Flight-
  Richard Davis-
  Northern Neck Computer Users Group
• 3rd Place: Black Swallowtail-
  Richard Davis-
  Northern Neck Computer Users Group

D. Still life (which the rules define as: Still life is any object not shown in motion; architecture, automobiles, boats, sculpture, historical objects, etc.)

• 1st Place: Driftwood–
  Richard Davis-
  Northern Neck Computer Users Group
• 2nd Place: Building Reflections – Phil Ball-

  Prescott Computer Society

• 3rd Place: BridgeAtNight-
  Linda B. Boyatzies -
  Northern Neck Computer Users Group

Best of Show: Edge of Light –
Phil Ball-
Prescott Computer Society

3. Name That User Group

When you correspond with APCUG, renew membership, make a suggestion, gripe about something — please give full identification for your user group! With hundreds of groups in APCUG’s database — many with similar or identical acronyms — and thousands of volunteers listed, it’s often difficult or impossible to determine which group is being discussed.
Mysteries delay responses and wastes folks’ time digging through
records. Please provide full group name, acronym, Web URL, city/state,
email and telephone contact information, your position in the group, and
anything else that will help APCUG respond to you. Sometimes even
Advisors — the APCUG volunteers closest to user group members —
haven’t memorized all the groups in our regions, so these clues are
always appreciated.

 

4. Database Update

CDB Information – This item is for the Presidents of our member groups. Please be sure that your user group’s information is correct and up to date
in the database on the APCUG web site. This information is very important, to both us and you. It allows us to communicate with you and your officers concerning changes in the organization. It also allows sponsors to contact the correct person in your group. We would like the President or APCUG representative of each of the groups to log on and verify the information. If you have forgotten your login and password, send a message to the secretary at secretary@apcug.net, and it will be forwarded to you

5. Regional Specific  – Wake up Region 5

Have you ever had a presenter cancel a day or so before your meeting?
Are you having difficulty getting presenters to visit your club?
Do you have members who might be homebound?
Is one of your clubs services helping to repair member’s computers?

We now have solutions for these problems.

Let me tell you about Windows Live Meeting and SharePoint.

APCUG has established closer relationship with Microsoft, as a result, they are providing services that would be quite expensive in the market place.

Live Meeting is a program that all APCUG User Groups have access to. It allows you to broadcast a meeting remotely to up to 250 locations. It allows you to have a presenter at the other end of the country or world for that matter visit your club electronically. You can see and hear them make a presentation. It is interactive and questions can be asked of the presenter a major advance over PIAB’s. APCUG will train and authorize selected members of your group to hook up to Live Meeting. This service ordinarily sells for $4.50 per person per month, way beyond the budget of most user groups. APCUG members get it FREE.

If you go the www.sharepoint.com/apcug you will get to the SharePoint website. There we will be posting newsletters, PowerPoint presentations for all APCUG members to use.

This year there is another compelling reason to rejoin. You may have heard about next spring’s Regional Technology Conference aboard the Norwegian “Sky” February 26,March 1, 2010. This is event is shaping up to be historic. Never before has there been a User Group Conference at sea. You will not want to be shutout of this experience. You will need to act quickly, as cabin space is going quickly.

We toured the ship and found it to more than meets our needs. It looks great! For those of you who have never cruised before it is a great opportunity to break the ice, at a great price to surf upon the Norwegian Sky. What a great way to use your $250 Social Security stimulus. The waters between Miami and the Bahamas, I have been told is among the calmest anywhere. Now, ALL your members are welcome to attend this conference not only the leadership as previously was the case. This offer is only available to APCUG and FACUG member groups.
It is shaping up to be an extraordinary experience. It will be a weekend full of outstanding programs, many surprises, yet plenty of time to party.

We are departing from the port of Miami on Friday February 26, 2010 at 5:00 PM. You can board as early as 11:30 AM. Lunch will be available in the Princess dining room until 2PM and at the buffet afterwards. NCL has Free Style dining. Eat whenever you want and dress however you want.
The initial 99 inside cabins rate is $173. This includes all taxes, fees and trip insurance. These are rock bottom prices. For the cost of an average hotel room for a single night you can go cruising and have all your meals and entertainment included. When these cabins sell out, unfortunately, NCL will be increasing the price $30-$40 per person. Outside cabins will be $60 p/p above the base rate of $173. We will be offering the opportunity for bus service to the port, from the west and east coasts as well as South Florida. It will be less costly than parking at the port.

There is a $50 conference registration fee for those wishing to attend the conference. At least one person in each cabin must register for the conference. There will be a $36 charge for gratuities for the cabin steward, waiter, busboy and Maître D that is prepaid. Any additional services you may desire are at your discretion. This deal will probably never be able to be duplicated. We have only reserved 300 cabins of which about half have already been inquired about.

See the FACUG (www.facug.org ) website for additional details.

We therefore, are asking you, if you would please cut and paste the cruise information part of this mail and send it to your entire membership.

If you are interested in participating in this exciting and unique event or have questions, send an email to ap5@ariesmart.com and a cc: to stusil@comcast.net, with names of cruisers, name of member organization and whether you want an inside or ocean view cabin.

Those who respond to this inquiry will receive a notice shortly with additional information about registration and booking procedures The rate that you will receive, will be assigned on a first come first served basis.

I am very happy to congratulate the Boca Raton Computer Society on their first place award in the APCUG Newsletter contest and the Broward Personal Computer Association’s 3rd place award.
Barry Rimmer of the Lake Sumpter Computer Society placed first in the animal category of the APCUG Photo Contest.

Go Florida ! ! !

Your group is a member of APCUG; you have received this e-mail to inform you of updates, changes, or special news and information. APCUG’s policy is to send e-mail messages only to announce such information, and we will continue to honor this policy. If you no longer want to receive these e-mails, please reply to the sender. Thank you for being a member of APCUG.

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Region 5 Report…. by Stu Silverman

The weekend of March 13 -15 2009 was spent in the pleasant and friendly town of Zephyrhills on the West Coast of Florida, a bit North of Tampa, where I attended the APCUG/FACUG Spring Conference.  The Conference started out with an informal dinner on Friday evening at a little restaurant buffet restaurant called Luptons, who also catered the Conference.  This was followed by a reception of the host club Pasco Area Computer User Group at their regular meeting location.  Besides giving the attendees a chance to greet old friends that they may have met at previous conferences, Jay Ferron spoke and Dave (Doc) Dockery of the Tampa Bay Computer Society entertained us with his optimistic view of the future of technology. 

On Saturday morning the Conference formally opened with a bang as Smart Computing, a longtime friend of User Groups sponsored a wonderful breakfast.  Once again, Lindsey Alpers and crew made their usual top notch presentation.

The next session I attended and participated in was one offered by Region 1 Advisor and newly elected FACUG President, Sam Wexler of the Valencia Falls Computer & Technology Club and FACUG Director Jeff Robins of the Bellaggio Computer User Group.  They spoke about some innovative ways of increasing membership.  Sam has evolved his club into a computer & TECHNOLOGY club.  What is the difference?  A computer club generally discusses emails, surfing the internet, malware and similar topics.  Since many members feel they already know what they want to know, they may feel the club cannot help them.  A computer and technology club does what a computer club does plus a lot more.  During the past six months, Sam’s club had presentations in topics like automotive technology, televisions, keeping your mind sharp, travel, the history of technology and www.match.com.  Many of these presenters were novice or intermediate at best but the meetings were very well received.  Club members become involved in all sorts of consumer electronics and themes.  This increases the size of the pie. There are many potential members who may not be computer enthusiasts but are interested in such things as iPods, Slingbox, Roku or Smartphones, as some examples.  They have established relationships with Apple, Best Buy and Circuit City. They come to meetings, make presentations and often offer discount cards for attendees. He shows tech related movies, such as his most recent one, “The Net,” where he served sangria and snacks prior to the meeting.  Jeff Robins has established a book and DVD library for members use.  They offer both small and large door prizes. The large ones are offered every 3 or 4 months and you get one entry for each meeting attended. They have swap tables to share used stuff. These are just a few of the many ideas presented and they seem to come up with additional ideas for almost every other meeting.  In the current economy, many User Groups are hurting, but the common thread among those groups that are thriving is that they offer new and novel themes.

The next presentation was by Liz Stenger, who introduced me to a whole “new world” of virtual worlds.  It looks like a great deal of fun.  I can’t wait to getting involved in creating my own 3D Avatar, traveling around on a magic carpet and being transported from one area to another. You might want to go to www.secondlife.com  and get a more complete introduction.

 Our own Don Singleton introduced the crowd to remote presentations. House Call, with the help of a free program called Cross loop, allows you to have access to another person’s computer.  It gives User groups the ability to help repair a member’s computer without having to travel to their home to do it.  Using Skype for audio and video allows User Groups to present courses live, online. Try www.snipurl.com/d42gs, www.unyte.net, www.teamviewer.com and www.ustream.tv  to find out more about broadcasting meetings live.  This is great for shut-ins, those who may be out of town when meetings are held, snowbirds or if a big snowstorm hits on the day of your meeting.

Don Singleton once again appeared on the screen in Zephyrhills, Florida while physically remaining in Tulsa, OK.  We received an overview of Microsoft’s Live Meeting product. Microsoft has donated the free use of Live Meeting for all APCUG members.  Any group looking to have a remote presentation from a vendor or who would like to reach up to 250 locations can get free training by APCUG to certify their clubs ability to use the program.  This can be a tremendously valuable tool, as more and more vendors are no longer finding visiting individual clubs and making presentations economically viable, thus making remote presentations the way of the future.  Live Meetings can be recorded and placed on website or on www.sharepoint.com.

Doc Dockery talked about using Wikis as a powerful collaboration tool for your kit.  Did you ever use emails to set a meeting time and place?  Wikis are more effective since they are multi-directional and emails operate in only one direction.  Wikis can be created at www.pbwiki and www.wikispaces.com.

The Magix software company, one of our sponsors presented an overview of many of their products. You can go to www.magix.com, www.magicwidgets.com and www.magixinfo.com to find out more.

The next presentation was also an awakening session.  Tara Lamberson of www.doterati.com spoke of the growing expanded uses of social networking, formally known as Web 2.0.  We learned about cross blogging sites like www.ted.com and the increasing popularity of Twitter, the Facebook Fan Page. These can be used by businesses to make connections with suppliers or consumers. You can contact them at taralamberson@gmail.com, twitter@doterati.com or twitter@taralamberson.com

APCUG President Jay Ferron gave an extremely frightening security presentation.  He enumerated the many ways that the bad guys mine for information to steal your identity.  Needless to say, most of us are often way too willing to provide little bits of information to varying websites which can be aggregated to become a really risky adventure.  DO NOT list your mother’s real maiden name, DO NOT list you real date of birth etc.

Jay also introduced us to Windows 7 beta, which is to be released “in the near future”.  Windows 7 is said to overcome some of the annoyances of Vista, it is more robust, doesn’t use as much ram as Vista and loads relatively quickly.  A copy of the beta version was given to all participants.  It has the least glitches of any previous beta OS.  Jay encouraged all Beta testers to send comments and bugs to www.connect.microsoft.com. You can download a program to create a virtual PC. This enables you to run your current operating system alongside Windows 7, therefore allowing you to maintain your current operating system. Here is the URL, http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/details.aspx?FamilyID=04d26402-3199-48a3-afa2-2dc0b40a73b6&displaylang=en

All this and we had yet to have programs on Sunday.  

Sunday began with a breakfast sponsored by AI squared.  Scott Moore presented their latest version of ZoomWare which is a light version of their classic program ZoomText.  This is a company that provides vision enhancing software.  ZoomText is for those with severe vision deficits and ZoomWare for those of us above the age of forty, who discover that their arms are shrinking and they need bi-focals as they try to read.  It is especially helpful for those who spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen.  ZoomWare enhances the size of all or part of a screen without losing sharpness. While Windows has ways of increasing the size of some browser items, it lacks the versatility of ZoomWare.  I think it is great for use with a projector at User Group meetings.  They now have a User Group special of $49 (a really great discount of the current price).  Go to www.zoomware.com and use the code FACUG 09.

Robert Dempsey introduced us to the world of Cloud Computing.  Basically, it is a paradigm shift away from Microsoft’s model of all software being purchased and remaining on your machine to where you either can use open source products or rent the software online only as you need it or for a monthly fee.  It eliminates the need for companies to spend a lot for hardware, there is no infra-structure to support and capacity can be added on an as-needed basis.

Stan Ashbrook took us through the use of Photoshop on line. This is a free program and another example of cloud computing. Go to www.photoshop.com and get access to basic Photoshop tools and the ability to post your pictures on their site to share with others and without having to make a purchase.  An online site for PowerPoint like presentations is www.sliderocket.com.

Mike Ungerman, first FACUG President in the early 1990s made a presentation about Ning.  Ning is another example of social networking.  You can download this free software at www.ning.com.  What in the world is Ning anyhow?  Why would I want to download it?  Ning, as I interpret offers the ability to build a basic website in just a few minutes.  It is not a fancy site with all the bells and whistles but does provide a site that is easy to design and even easier to maintain.  You get your own domain address (if available) for example, www.ning.stusil.com.  You can invite people to your website and use it for collaborative efforts.  Your User Group can sell ads or have partnerships whereby if a visitor clicks a link from your site, your club gets paid.  Mike created a website on the spot for one of the attendees to demonstrate how really simple it can be.  An interactive Newsletter can now be offered.  How exciting!

Chuck Vroman spoke about the most discussed word at the conference.  The buzz was all about Twitter and how it could be used to communicate.  A company could develop a following among its customers and be able to offer short timeframe specials to those who follow him on Twitter.  Twitter is a relatively new social networking tool.  It is sometimes referred to as a mini-blog as it is limited to 140 characters and is very useful for mobile phones.  A Twitter message is referred to as a Tweet.  One can Tweet throughout the day and chronicle one’s events of the day. Even Sen. McCain, a self professed computer illiterate is now Twittering.

This year we held a raffle for an HP Netbook.  The winner was Doris Collins, APCUG’s Regional Advisor and President of the Computer Club of Oklahoma City.  Congratulation Doris!

This was followed up by dispensing door prizes and saying our goodbyes.  While there were additional programs offered, obviously I could not attend them all.

Once again FACUG has presented a wonderful conference.  A great deal of the credit needs to go to Marie Vesta, Conference Chair and Hewie Poplock, Program Chair.  I feel the program was outstanding.  It brought many new concepts for us to contemplate. We tried several new things that seemed to work quite well.

 Next year FACUG will again team up with APCUG for another Regional Conference.  This time we will be moving about 200 miles south to Palm Beach County.  Sam Wexler, FACUG’s newly elected President, has promised a spectacular conference and we look forward to seeing you there next year.  Remember FACUG will no longer be having a Fall Conference so all our energies will be concentrated on the Spring Conference.  If you came this year, we know you will want to come again next year. If you missed this year, you cannot afford to miss it again.

Video Streams from The FACUG/APCUG Conference March 14-15

Please note: Some sessions are broken into more than 1 part. Some sessions were not recorded.  No editing has been done. PDF File of this list