The August meeting of the TI-Chips was called to order, and the Minutes from the July meeting were read. It was found that I had misinterpreted part of John Parken's presentation at the July meeting. In order to correct my erroneous report, here is a summary of John's July presentation in his own words. "The default for outlook express is to filter all attachments as virus laden. It is a check on a security tab that changes the default. The program I brought in gives you the windows xp cd key you used to install it if you should lose the code of authenticity that comes with the program." (Sorry for the misunderstanding and omission in the July minutes, John.) The minutes were then accepted as corrected and ammended.
Lin Shaw gave the Treasurer's report, and I stated that I had forgotten to give him the receipts from the July raffle. I'll correct this as soon as possible. My bad! I guess I was having a really bad July.
There were no Membership or disk library reports this month.
As feedback to John Parken's talk about GOODMEM, I reported that I had downloaded and installed GOODMEM.exe into my system, and found that it actually does free up active memory. GOODMEM does this in either of two available options. Option 1 allows GOODMEM to automatically restore memory in 10 meg chunks. Option 2 enables the user to manually set the size of memory desired to be restored. (I had my doubts, but found that this utility really works.) I set it to run in the background to monitor and automatically recover memory. (I think GOODMEM is well worth the Internet search and download.)
We talked some more about the direction for the TI-Chips as a "viable" user group. So far, the consensus is to leave everything as it stands, but with a suggestion submitted by Norb Sitter. Norb suggested that I E-mail meeting reminders to the membership, and ask for "Regret Only" RSVP. This way I would be able to detemine how many members would/could NOT attend a given meeting, and if the projected attendance would be too low, I could send out notices that the meeting for that month will be cancelled. (This sounds like a workable solution to meeting planning and preparation problems as well for those who drive long distances to attend.) Therefore I will be E-mailing reminders starting in September.
Harry Hoffman gave us all a very pleasant surprise. Harry brought in E-mail he had received from our long time, fellow member, Curtis (Curt) Gadd. It seems that Curt and his wife have been vacationing out of the country for a while, and that he had also changed his ISP provider. Curt's new ISP is: Gadd@gbronline.com Curt mentioned that he had missed receiving communications from the Chips, and was wondering how we were all doing. (As we were all wondering about Curt. It would be a nice to drop him a line to say, "Hi.") Thank you, Harry.
There was some discussion about the Blackout of 2003. We asked if the lack of lighting reflection in Thursday's night sky made Les' star gazing hobby that much more enjoyable. Les Kee responded by handing out two CDs containing astronomy software called: "Space Explorer II". Les gave the CDs to anyone who wanted to give them a try. Thanks, Les.
Ron Markus stated that Ramcharged Computers is still in business, and that he still handles the Texaments products he bought out some time ago.
Lucille Mayer won the August 50:50 drawing. Lucy donated her winnings to the TI-Chips. Congratulations and THANK YOU, Lucy.
The September meeting of the TI-Chips will be held on September 20