The January meeting of the TI-Chips was called to order and the minutes from the December Christmas party / meeting were read and accepted. Lin Shaw gave the Year End financial report. Lin stated that we were within $11 of last year's closing. (Talk about financial stability!) John Parken stated our membership remains at a constant 22 members. It was said that the TI-Chips has historically had a very high percentage of membership in attendance at most meetings over the twenty years we've been in existence. (This is quite an accomplishment!)
Les Kee reported that there was no activity in the disk library. However, Les said his son, Scott, is willing to assume the position of Web Master for our web site. Welcome aboard Scott. We're looking forward to meeting and working with you. Les said he will send me Scott's ISP address to enable me to start a dialog with Scott. (Thanks Les.)
We also talked about some of the features we would like to have included in our web site. One would be a thumbnail page of TI-Chips member's pictures. This would enable the site visitor to select an individual picture of a TI-Chips member without having to wait for the entire set of member's pictures to be loaded. The other is a memorial page, with suitable graphics and music, to remember TI-Chips members and Cleveland area TI'ers who have died. We hope both projects will come to fruition.
There was some discussion concerning writing code in HTML for the web site. I said it seemed, to me at least, that HTML coding presented the same problems in understanding that writing code in TI Assembly did. It was probably just a mind set for me, but I felt that I was attempting to write in a language that went into a deep, dark hole and I didn't know what was going to come out. (A poor analogy, but you get what I mean.) Les Kee said he had tried his hand at Assembly a long time ago, and had experienced some limited success. (Thanks for the encouraging reply Les.)
John Parken said he was experiencing some frustration in trying to get his PC / Windows system to save embedded or attached E-mailed JPG pictures in JPG format. It seems that his system defaults to a memory intensive BMP format. I said I would give it a shot with my Compaq / Windows98 laptop and see what happens.
John Parken won this month's 50:50 raffle. Congratulations John.
The meeting was adjourned with the announcement that the next meeting, of the TI-Chips, will be in the Storytime room of the North Royalton branch library on Saturday, February 21 from 10:00 AM 'til noon.