TI-Chips' Online

The February meeting of the TI-Chips was opened and a brief synopsis of the January minutes was presented. I had neglected to give credit to Ron Markus (RamCharged Computers) for his suggestion to soak the ink jets in warm water to reactivate plugged ink jet ports. Once again, Ron, thanks for the tip. It worked very well.

Lin Shaw gave the Treasurer's report. Lin stated that since no moneys were transferred either in or out of the TI-Chips' account during January, there would be no report. John Parken said we were holding our membership at a solid 18 members. Les Kee stated that, once again, there was no activity in the club's library to report.

I passed out Jim Peterson Achievement Award ballots for 2001 for those in attendance to cast their votes. I reminded those voting that this was not a "butterfly" ballot and there would be no chads to inspect during the count. I also stated that I would bring in ballots to every meeting until the voting deadline.

There was some discussion about Rich Polivka's offer to open an E-mail account for those in the TI-Chips who would like to have an alternate account available. Craig Getty explained how Rich's proposal would work, and there seemed to be some interest in establishing personal E-mail accounts through Rich's site. Rich's offer was made available only to members of the TI-Chips user group. I was requested to E-mail Rich a request to provide us with the URL address needed to take Rich up on his offer. The individual accounts would have the base address of x @ TIChips.99er.net. (Where 'x' is the individual's preferred user/screen name.) (I hope I recorded this correctly.)

Harry brought in a letter from on of our old time members, Curt Gadd. Curt and his wife are in Florida for the winter season, and expect to return to the Cleveland area sometime in May. Curt said they were doing well and were in the process of procuring a replacement computer system.

Harry Hoffman brought in a sample of a printed collage (Harry's "Rogue's Gallery") of the pictures he took at the January meeting. He also brought in a 3½" floppy containing these pictures in a .GIF format. Harry explained that he used the GIF format because the resultant graphic files were the smallest in this format. [Craig Getty gave us a detailed explanation of the differences in the various graphic image formats. (i.e., BMP, JPG and GIF)]

I brought in my Polaroid PDC640 digital camera to take some pictures of the group for our web site. I had also taken an outside shot of the North Royalton library where we meet. I said I will bring the camera in to each meeting in an effort to get as many members' pictures on record as possible. Not only will these shots be uploaded onto our web site (Webmaster's note: You can see them now RIGHT HERE! However, they have been cropped & compressed from Glenn's originals in the .zip file.), but I will E-mail a package of pictures to the TI-Chips' members when I upload them into my system at home.

I had asked if anybody took advantage of Radio Shack's promotional offer of a free :CueCat® bar code scanner that will read all bar codes and take you directly to the manufacturer's Web site. Les Kee said he had picked up one, but, like me, hadn't installed the software yet.

Speaking of Les Kee, Les won this month's 50:50 raffle. Congratulation Les.

The next meeting of the TI-Chips will be on Saturday, March 17 from 10:00 to noon in the, now get this, STORY TIME ROOM! (The library changed the name of our meeting room to coincide with it being in the children's section of the library.) Actually Chippers, the name isn't all that far off from what we do during our meetings.

-Glenn Bernasek

Newsletter Contact Information