Who showed: ber, rien, sklarm, rwp, donner, jmiz, lenny, bub and mappel
The t-shirts generously sent to us by the Apple User Group people were distributed to those in attendance. Nice shirts too. White long sleeved 100% cotton with a simple apple logo on the left breast. Everyone will wear them to their budget meeetings. (absent members' shirts will be sent to them.) The Office v.X coasters didn't go over as well. There were also tasteful apple paper folders as well as iMac and eMac postcards with no blank space to write on. AUG didn't send us those. I ordered them from the apple store.
We talked about Xserve a bit until the discussion veered towards corporate IT management psyche. Donner wanted a half width version. Maybe 8"x9"x1.5U. But he only needed half as much disk. Marc then proceeded to do an on-the-fly review of the book (the naked truth) New Riders sent us. Maybe he wouldn't have been so harsh if he had known it was intended for Mac Lovers. Lenny took it home to review in private.
I tried to direct the membership to address our building's multi-airport base station routing issues. Rob took up the gauntlet but when he discovered his tibook did not have issues and the other seven macs in the building did, he threw it back down where it lay until the end of the meeting. He did however accept an insulated cup (dixie brand) of onion soup and was not the only member to do so. John didn't bring his powerbook.
Mappel tried to sidetrack us into a discussion of AFS on Windows. That only went so far. We puzzled over the signifance of the names "Carbon", and "Cocoa". That didn't go much further. Virtual PC was mentioned which only lenny uses. Linksys beat out airport in the "finding out what's going on with the network" department. I blathered about BSD being an optional Developer Tool install.
We talked about Mach/BSD and what distinguishes them to the user developer. There was talk about bluetooth/tv68/voicestream and cdma networks. Being one of two in attendance not owning a mobile phone I just ate my soup. Bub asked if people were seeing their ipod batteries run down more quickly with the most recent update. The ipod owners raised their hands. Rob speculated it was to do with the new features such as the clock.
Lenny had but one issue and it wasn't controversial. SecurityServer crashes when he mistypes his password at the login window. He'd be dumped to the true classic environment. - ;login:. (he discovered the following day it was related to his webcam's quicktime component.)
Mappel challenged the group to describe the features of Mac/OS X that would convince him to buy in. We just pointed at the thinkpad on his lap. The one he was spending the entire meeting trying to get to connect to our wep enabled airport network (yes, the one with bizarre routing issues.) We finally took pity and turned off security for the duration. I think the other two compelling features described were battery life and crashreportd (which by the way crashes just about daily for me.) Mikey pointed out a correlation between new machines and longer battery life.
rien was injured, but not seriously, trying to twist of a non-twist-off cap.
It started raining so we adjourned the meeting at 9:30pm to play "find the cab in the rain". rickt's contributions were missed. I'm threatening to bring talking points to the next gathering.
ber