Next Meeting

Another month of last minute's scramble to find a meeting spot. As most of you know, we ended up meeting in the Food Court at Patrick Henry Mall for the Saturday get together. Not too bad, but we did have a few looky-loos who couldn't quite figure out what we were doing. Since a combination of circunstances worked out to prevent Cathy Jaegar from presenting her scheduled program on new Medical Programs, I had planned to give an update on high speed modems. With no way to present any visuals, I talked my way through the whole thing, winding up with my sincere recommendation: if you already have a 56K modem, wait until your Internet Service Provider updates his machinery to the new V90 protocol. If you don't have one, wait awhile before making your choice. Supposedly, the new standard is backwards compatible, but as far as I know, there haven't been any published reports on that subject yet.

For the mid-month meeting, Steve Portnoy and I talked about a couple of programs that had struck our fancy during the last month. Steve introduce Serria's 3d home design software. He had picked it up at the Price Club for around $40.00. What a neat aid for planning your new home or even remodeling your old digs. I described the latest street level mapping program from Delorme, Street Atlas 5. I briefly discussed it last month in my Media Notes column and this presentation detailed its finer points in more detail. The best improvement was the addition of address to address routing, just like their Map N Go trip planning product.

****** It now looks like we will meet at Christopher Newport University's Gosnold Hall, Room 111 for the month of April. Thanks to the good offices of Carl Sandahl and his good friend, Randy Caton, arrangement have been made. See you there. Hopefully, by the time May rolls around, we will have secured the infamous conference room at the mall. We'll see.