[H-GEN] Vice President's report.

[Rick Phillips]

I live on the Sunshine Coast and it has never been very convenient to
visit Humbug on a regular basis although I have been a lurker on this
list for a long time (maybe a dozen years).  I had visited the club
about half a dozen times usually when it had sponsored something well
worthwhile such as the Red Hat tour many years ago.

The club membership face to face was always welcoming but I regret to
say that on the list, a request for help years ago used to generate
sarcastic replies at times and I remember well the flame war about text
editors I accidentally started when I made a comment about what I liked
to use.  That war raged for more than a week.  The list now is much more
sedate but I have to admit that I turn to SLUG these days if I want some
scripting help.  This is because of the bad memories from before.  SLUG
has always been friendly and supportive.

We used to have our own group here on the Sunshine Coast called NOOSALUG
but that suffered dwindleing membership such that it is now defunct.
Three of the old group continue to meet once a month for coffee and tech
talk at a member's home.  We don't take computers any more because we
have been using Linux for so long that we don't need to.  There is a
fourth person in the mini group but he is not well enough to make the
drive at night.  Suffice to say we are all very "handy" with Linux and
don't really need the heavy support that our group used to provide.

I agree with one of the other commenters - Linux has become so easy to
use that we really don't need the support like we used to.  I remember
the days when simply trying to mount a drive (especially SATA) could be
a challenge and to get a wireless network card or a Canon printer
working was black magic with bad language guaranteed.  Canon's policy in
those used to be "Linux - what's that?"

I also remember that (at least it seemed to me), a lot of people
attended Humbug because of the high speed downloads available at the
Uni.  Now everyone has cheap high speed internet and the need/attraction
has changed.

I may be way off the mark but that's as me sees it in a very changed
situation.

Rick