Hunterdon Computer Club November 1999 Newsletter PDF
Synopsis:
The regular HCC meeting was held on October 19 at HMC, Flemington. We made history by having the lowest attendance since our early years, and no guests.
President Lon Hosford called the meeting to order at 9:30 A.M. and moved directly into the Q & A session. Ilene Shope raised the question of lack of interest in computer clubs among younger people. Among explanations of-fered: : They know everything……They take the computer for granted as a tool that they use all day and are not interested in it as a hobby. …..They have grown up with computers and don’t have the Wow! And Gee Whiz! reactions of peo-ple who once used typewriters and mimeograph machines, or set metal type.
The only business transacted was the closing of nominations for the entire slate of officers. There were no nominations from the floor and the slate remains the same as shown on page 5.
One new member family joined us, the Meinhardts of 149 Thatchers Hill Road, Flemington. Eric Meinhardt is following Max Weinstein’s career plan of starting with a big company as an industry trainer, then starting his own business. Max is tak- ing advantage of the freedom this offers by leaving us in January to move to Bos- ton. Max is continuing with training, while Eric is going into Web Site Design.
Lon Hosford commented on an Adobe workshop at an NJCC meeting. Jim Russ presented one of the short topics. Adobe presented Photo Shop,. Illustrator, and Acrobat, all in one hour. Adobe wanted 140 people, but 100 attended. Problems from hurri- cane Floyd interefered.
Treasurer Jac Carroll reported a balance of $572.23
There was discussion of the Pentium chip getting a new name, Intium. There was also comment that domain names which people got free or at very low cost are now selling at high prices. Lon said Yahoo was running a domain name auction.
In a sort of bad news round table, we heard about problems with Win98 not shutting down, with a took patch available ; bugs in IE Exploder ; a Java problem with a 6.3 Mb patch; bugs in Excel with a 2.8 Mb fix. Jac has found that IE 4 and 5 must be de- leted to reinstall Win95, involving a 3 hour process and 6 pages of instructin. Joe added that Microsoft has put out a disk with Y2 K fixes, but Windows can’t recognize it.
The Program Visio by Jim Russ
This program promises to turn an idea into a diagram, as far as company organi- zation goes. We saw version 4. You can see more at Visio.com. Joe Burger noted that Microsoft now owns Visio and will add it to the next version of Office.
The upgprade cossts $74.69, full program $133.74 to $150. Supershop- per Russ bought versio 4 for $39. 00 at a show. It comes on 1 CD or 14 floppies. It takes 18 Mb on your hard drive or 1 Mb if you run the program from the CD.
Visio will design flow charts for proj- ects, organization charts, office layouts or building networks. Jim saw little use for this program at home, although you could use it to show a family tree. You can install it to run or copy charts into Word or Excel. The newer versions let you save the chart as a web page.