President’s
Message
By Tom Burt
General Meeting
Our February General Meeting will be held at Desert Vista on
February 7, 2008 at 7 pm. Our presenter will be the Club’s Creative
Graphics SIG leader,
Lab and Classroom Sign-in Systems
In
late December, the Association reconfigured its photo ID badge making
system. Since all the Association’s
point of sale, fitness and monitor stations are now equipped with bar-code
scanners, the badge making system discontinued encoding the magnetic strip on
the back of the ID cards. If you have a
recently made card, and try to swipe it through our magnetic stripe readers,
your card will not be recognized. The
short term solution is to type in your ID number or click the “Find” button and
enter the first few letters of your last name.
I’m ordering some bar-code scanners to attach to our sign-in PCs and
will try to have them set up by the end of the month. When finished, this will be a nice
improvement. The bar codes are much more
dependable and easier to scan.
Technical Tidbits
Microsoft is getting very close to releasing Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista and Service Pack 3 for Windows XP. Both of these are reported to improve Windows performance, reliability and security. We’ll try to get some “early look” sessions scheduled as soon as the service packs are available.
For those of you with Microsoft Office 2007, there is a Service Pack 1 available via Microsoft Update. However, apparently the update is prone to fail halfway through. So you may want to defer installing it until those problems get resolved.
Open Lab PCs.
If you have used one of the PCs, Please take a moment before leaving the lab and make sure to properly shut it down. The new HP PCs are very quiet and it’s easy to forget. Over the New Year’s week-end on Monday, Dec 31, I stopped by the lab and found one of the PCs had been left running since the preceding Saturday. If you see the power button is lit up and blue, the PC is still running.