I write this on Friday, February 13, after scrapping the column that I had written over the last three weeks. The events of the last week have struck home hard. While working away at a gold mine in WA, I was trying to think what we as an organisation could do that would have a real effect on this bushfire disaster. I had already asked Annette in the office to make a cash donation on Monday to the Red Cross Appeal in the Club's name and we have a Bill Gates Autographed edition of Microsoft Vista that we are looking to organize a formal raffle for to raise funds for the bushfire relief, but it is already apparent that cash was not going to be a limiting factor with donations pouring in from all quarters.

With major assistance from Terry Kemp who tracked down the right people to contact and Henry Craven who acted as our spokesperson we have contacted the Department of Human Services with an offer to set up community "internet cafe" type services in what in effect are going to be refugee camps here in Victoria to enable people to restore their communication links with family and friends.

This offer has been well received and they are looking to integrate it into their overall response. Our impression was this aspect of recovery services had not been considered. We have also offered our help with sourcing and integration of hardware, software and installation of the systems for this and also to help anybody that needs help with setting up replacement home systems for similar purposes.

I have had the office staff working on establishing a list of members from the affected areas to try to contact over the next few weeks to see what we might be able to do to assist. Already in the newsgroups since I got home on Friday evening I have read the items from Charles Comport and Barry Carle and I fear that there is worse to come. It places the problems that the club faces in perspective.

Club business

As some of you might be away we have had a major equipment failure at the Burnley facility which Richard Solly managed to patch up after giving up his Sunday afternoon. This event revealed a major problem in our ISP service resulting in our needing to scrap old systems incapable of repair or of meeting our current requirements. This, together with the discovery of severe limitations of our Membership Management System (MMS) in the office, have displaced the seeking of a Club- branded ADSL offering as our major project. (It is still being worked on but as the B-grade problem). We hope that by the time you are reading this before the March monthly meeting that the ISP service will be completely functional. The MMS will take a little longer to resolve.

Feedback from members regarding the monthly meeting at Chadstone has been overwhelmingly positive and it is likely that future meetings will be held there on an ongoing basis with our regular city venue continuing as before.

I have also asked the technical wizards in the club to look into videoing the monthly meeting with the intention of producing a podcast that will be available to all members from the club's website or as a disc for those members without broadband access.

I look forward to seeing you all at the meeting on the first Wednesday in March at the club premises. I will be on site from around 6pm. Come and bend my ear.

Keith Younger
 

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