[plug] PLUG Meeting this week - Tues 7:30pm.

[James Bromberger]

On 12/04/2011 9:45 PM, Peter wrote:
> On 10/04/11 12:09, James Bromberger wrote:
>> This week's meeting in Katanning!
>
> Thanks for an excellent first 'Virtual meeting' guys.  Can't say I'm
> an expert in .... whatever the guy in the yellow shirt was on about
> (sorry Harry) but Jim and I enjoyed the company and the pizza.Now that
> the first few kinks have been ironed out, it should be even better
> next time.

So a baptism by fire was the main approach tonight; having installed the
machines we just about managed to cobble together everything and test it
almost in time! Clearly we need to sped a bit more attention to the
audio feed, and the encoding was pretty useless on the screen capture -
too blurry/small when encoded at 360 x 288! But it was a start and as a
proof of concept, I think it worked - so the AV team are going to get
thinking caps on and try and put a proposal together for funding; PLUG
doesn't have any cameras, tripods, nor a PC fast enough that is fully
working to encode the stream in real time (we borrowed a shell account
on a UCC machine tonight to do that - thanks Bob).

I'll move the rest of my more detailed thoughts to the AV list; anyone
who would like to help play with this please join this list:
http://lists.plug.org.au/mailman/listinfo/av


Of course, thank to Harry for giving the talk, and putting up with me
asking him to repeat questions so our virtual guests could hear!


> There will be pizza and hopefully even more good company in Katanning
> in a few weeks time.

Excellent. And more people hopefully too. If anyone else further afield
wants to "host" a regional PLUG get together to watch stream, and chat
back via IRC, please let us know.

> Thanks AV team.... and everyone else.

You're welcome. Tonight's stream was done by Jason Nichols, Mark Tearle,
Peter Lyons and myself. However, much of the groundwork was also from
Tim Bowden, and Nick Bannon as we've worked several evenings to get
systems installed, and basic testing.

Some of you on the stream would have seen the PLUG video intro I quickly
jammed together. Its not very PLUG branded (just a collection of my
mostly PLUG pictures from 2002-2003). If we have any budding digital
artists on list who would like to help do something better, speak up!
Jingles, idents, logos, etc. Again, on the AV list please!

Next month we're in Fremantle at Nautronix for Carl Gharardi's talk on
IPv6. I've also confirmed today that June will be at IBM in west Perth
with a talk on High Performance Computing (perhaps they can encode our
ogg/theora stream:)  )? And July will be James Henstridge talking about
Ubuntu One - the Canonical Cloud offering (venue yet to be confirmed).
The PLUG calendar on the web site is updated with all this.

If you have a talk on a subject you'd liek to give, please let us know.
If you'd like to do a 5 minute Lightning Talk as well, with no slides,
just a stand-and-tell-it presentation, we can do that too.

If your membership is not up to date, please visit
https://secure.plug.org.au/about/bank-account for our bank account
details and costs so you can do an electronic transfer to PLUG, and then
let committee know (we do have an online sign up form, but its
notionally being moved between servers at the moment...). PLUG has 39
members, and 350 people lurking on this list. $10/year is not a lot of
money (and concession/student is $5/year) - not exactly a huge amount,
and something we are considering increasing, so sign up now before we
increase it! ;)

Other PLUG news; in the last month PLUG has received its ABN (and a
TFN), and it's own PO Box (well done Peter L)! We're now going through
the motions of updating the various bodies that need these details (Fair
Trading, our Bank, etc). We're also updating the list of office bearers
with Fair Trading, and shortly we'll have a few constitutional changes
(always a can of worms, but it will be simple stuff to start with, like
quorum numbers at AGMs as a % of membership, not a number that is
greater than the number of members that PLUG has!). And not to mention
the reasonably successful Quiz Night we had at the end of March, which
may become an annual event - meanwhile "PLUG in the pub" is on again
next month (its every 2 months, unless there's popular demand otherwise)!

  James

-- 
Mobile: +61 422 166 708, Email: james_AT_rcpt.to

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