[H-GEN] Vice President's report.

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2011, Rick Phillips wrote:

> 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

That's a shame.  The Humbug lists had a reputation for tolerance for a 
long time.  I think that is still true but perhaps they've had a few bad 
runs.

> editors I accidentally started when I made a comment about what I liked

Well if you mentioned certain editors no wonder you got called a
heretic! :)

> 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.

Humbug has some pretty strong scripters.  It never hurts to post to both 
(but not necessarily cross-post).

> 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.

I've heard of that happening to other smaller groups.  I've noticed though 
that groups in cities over say 0.5 million generally have enough critical 
mass to keep rolling.

> 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.

Yes that's an excellent point that I kept forgetting to mention.  No doubt 
it did draw people.  Humbug had 10Mb/s when my home modem was 14k4.

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

So I pondered something that I have previously thought about.

Non-LUGs in Brisbane are apparently going well.
LUGs in large cities in Australia and elsewhere are going well.

There is some commonality there.  They tend to follow a formula of having 
a short meeting (2-3 hours max) and focussing on a talk.

Humbug meta was going down that road but last I heard the venue got washed 
away with the floods.

So I think Humbug needs to focus more on talks.  We tried this at the 
meetings with middling success (both 'in my day' and after).  So I'd like 
to see something like Humbug Meta make a return.

hmm... I see that the old venue was very close to my work place.  I'll try 
to catch up with Clinton and see what is up.

This post is rambling a bit.  Oh well.

Cheers,

Rob

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