Our March General Meeting will be held at Desert Vista on Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 7 pm.  The presentation will be by the Las Vegas Metro Fraud Unit and will cover the topic "Fraud and Credit Cards".  See the General Meeting article for more details.

We will also be having a brief business meeting to have our membership formally approve the 2008 budget previously approved by the SCSCC board of directors.  The budget is currently available in PDF form from the table of contents page, or just click this hyperlink: http://www.scscc.com/REPEAT/scscc_2008_Final_Budget.pdf

Our April meeting will feature a team from the Apple Store to talk about the latest in Apple products.  We plan to have this meeting be an open house for all interested Sun City residents.

Our May meeting will be our Education / SIG Fair and we again plan to have this be an open house for all interested Sun City residents.

Lab and Classroom Sign-in Systems

The new bar-code scanners are now up and running on both the classroom and lab sign-in systems.  The previous magnetic stripe readers are also still in place in case your Association ID card is an old one and doesn't have a bar-code.  The bar codes are much more dependable and easier to scan.  If you need a new, bar-coded ID card, the Administration offices at Mountain Shadows will provide you one at no charge.  If you want, they'll even use your old photo. <g>.  By the way, you do not need to grasp the  bar-code reader before sliding your card under it.  Just hold your card face up, parallel to the floor and slide it under the bar-code reader, about one inch above the desk until you see the red scan line cross the bars of the bar-code.  You will hear a single peep to signal your card has been scanned successfully.

As many of you know, our lab student systems run Windows Vista Home Premium as the primary operating system.  To support our "Boot Camp" and "Beyond the Basics" classes, whose content is primarily based on Windows XP, as well as our Open Lab users who haven't yet had experience with Windows Vista, we have been using Virtual Machine technology that lets us run create a complete bootable Windows XP environment that runs as a program under Windows Vista.

We have been using the free Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machine program to implement these Windows XP environments.  One drawback has been that Virtual PC does not allow users to use their flash drives in the virtual XP environment.  I recently set up a different experimental virtual machine using the free open-source virtual machine program called Virtual Box.  Virtual Box does allow users to use flash drives in the XP virtual machines.  We will be switching over to using Virtual Box in the lab over the next month or so.  Among other advantages, this change will allow us to use flash drives in place of CDs in the Boot Camp classes.

Membership

As of February 26, our 2008 membership is 1068.

  

Education Activities for March

We have a great line-up of classes, seminars and SIGs for March.  See the March calendar as well as the Seminars, Classes and "SIGs and KKs" pages for full details.  Our education program is one of the great benefits of belonging to the Club.  No matter what your experience or skill level, you should find something to suit your needs.

New Constitution and By-Laws

The Association's CCOC committee recently asked all clubs to update their Constitution and By-Laws to bring them into closer compliance with their model documents.  The Board and I are working on this, but as with any legalistic documents, it's heavy wading.  We hope to have the new documents ready for review by our membership by April, but approval at a business meeting will likely not be possible until the June general meeting because of the May open-house Education Fair.

Technical Tidbits

As projected last month, Microsoft has officially released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista (available for public download in early to mid-March) and is getting very close to releasing Service Pack 3 for Windows XP.   Both of these large updates are reported to improve Windows performance, reliability and security.  As soon as we have good copies of the downloadable service pack files, we will place copies in a folder on each of the lab PCs, so that dial-up members can come in to the lab and copy the service packs off onto their own CD or DVD.