The Umbrella, South Hampton Roads User Group, SHRUG, January 2003, Ted London

We have elected our officers for the coming year. The following members will lead us through the new year:

Fred Brox, Chairman
Peter Coggeshall, Co-chairman
Hank Borchers, Co-chairman
Ted London, Secretary
Bill Mallory, Treasurer

Kim Lewandowski, Membership
Ann Harney, Publicity
Jake King, Librarian
Walter Saunders Door Prizes
Ray Cicireli Member-at-Large

There is only one annoyance worse then receiving several unwanted calls a day from telemarketers. The daily barrage of unwanted email annoys all of us. Buddy Cook of Edifax was with us for our December meeting. He talked about some of the measures that his ISP takes to block spam email. Over very short periods of time, thousands of spam email messages are received and blocked before they can reach the subscribers. In spite of the various blocking software programs that many ISP's may use, spam email does get through. He demonstrated how Spam Assassin software works. His subscribers have the ability to turn on Spam Assassin for themselves. With this program, over 90% of the spam messages can be blocked. The blocked messages can be directed to a folder for examination for false-positives. Buddy feels that white list will be the most used method of dealing with spam.

We welcomed visitor Jim Moore to the meeting. He added much to discussion during the problem solving part of the meeting. Jim had visitor's luck. He won one of the door prizes. Walter Saunders, door prize chairman, assembled some nice prizes: Microsoft XP Professional, Encarta 2003, Tax Cut, Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft Front Page.

Membership participation in Special Interest Groups is down. Several reasons were put forth for the lack of interest. One of the most plausible seemed to be that software support is better today. There are now many resources available on the net. Smart Computing's website was mentioned as a very good site to obtain information although some areas of the site are available only to the magazines subscribers.

Some members feel that the club could better help its members by having hands-on demonstrations on such things as installing hardware or manipulating software. It was decided that the club computer would be set up at every meeting for demonstrations and problem solving.

Hank Borchers brought in a copy of the DOS Umbrella dated November '1990. He has saved every issue of the Umbrella. It was good to know how long the clubs under the Umbrella have been in existence.

Dutch Meyer, one of the pillars of SHRUG, recently suffered a mild stroke. Happily, he is making a speedy recovery.