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The January meeting will be one of our split SIG meetings. However, independently, both SIGs came to the same concept for their activities. Both will be asking members what they want to see and do at the meetings. We're very serious in wanting to know what each of you thinks, so please come with ideas and suggestions. Both SIGs will also be addressing any and all questions or problems you might have. In short, we're going to have a free form bull session. Should be fun. We won't have to go out into the lobby to do what we all do most meetings anyway.
This has now triggered the final auction round of the bidding.
On December 22nd the former Commodore UK management group made their formal counteroffer plus deposit to acquire the Amiga.
The liquidators are now making their final evaluations of the two offers.
A decision is expected very soon.
No further bids are anticipated.
While CEI reportedly put an expiration date of Dec. 30th on their bid, apparently they are willing to wait just a little while longer for the liquidators to make a final decision.
Again, all signs point toward the final ruling on the liquidation very shortly.
I will update this message immediately after a decision is announced."
Needless to say we want to see you back again too. With the death of Commodore and the future uncertain, we rely on each other far more than before. Please join with us again.
My second point is, when I took over the reigns as President, the club had just come back from the brink of not having enough funds to operate. Thanks to Steve Gast and Jeff Stevenson, our first President (My mentor) and our first Treasurer, we were saved. Since then I felt it was my responsibility to protect our assets as best I could. I hope this concern is felt by our next President as well. I know he shares my views on this. We are the only club that I know of that is still in the black and not on the edge of ruin.
My last point is one that I know you have heard before but I feel it needs repeating. Jim Huls is our new President and he deserves our support!! We have a machine that no longer has a manufacturer and support is dropping. This is your club and without your support it will die... Jim will need programs and other needs filled. Only a few people have supplied programs over the years, (Jim Lewis, Ed Serbe, Jim Huls, Kevin Hisel, Mark Landman, Dave Witt, Mike Latinovich are names that come to mind), and this is an area in which you can help. Even if you can't talk about something for a full 45 min. 10 or 15 would be fine. I have enjoyed being your President for low these many years and have had the opportunity to meet many new and interesting people. I have tried to allow the people who run our committees to have a free hand and found that when you do people have a tendency to surprise you. Thank you again for all you support and friendship. I hope our club will live long and prosper for many years. So .........
Happy to help.
Richard Rollins, Past President
I just wanted to let everyone know that my eyes and ears are open to any ideas one might have for the club. Since I'm and on the net quite frequently, please feel free to post to me. If you don't feel comfortable voicing your ideas or comments in public, you're welcome to post privately on Starship, email me at jhuls@cucug.org, or just grab me at a meeting.
I really like the way the club has been running for years and have no intention of truly changing anything. I do have a few goals for the club in the new year though.
1. Have more of the latest software and hardware shown and demoed
at the meetings.
2. Give CUCUG more of a net presences. (KH1 has already been doing
a nice job of this with the CUCUG home page on the WWW.)
3. Increase membership and club funds.
4. Build close relations with the new owners of the Amiga technology.
5. Enhance relations with many of the software developers.
I'm not interested in ever being a campaign manager in politics so there
might be a few other points I'll be pushing for the club that I just can't
think of at the moment. ;-)As far as I'm concerned the format for the general and board meetings should remain the same. They are well organized, productive, and effective. Like I said, I have no plans to make any alterations since I feel the current format works rather well. My main focus will be to build off of the club's success.
Before I end this I want to ask for help from the general club members on the first point I mentioned. I believe there to be enough new products available for the Amiga that are purchased by members to warrant a few showings. Of the latest available, I'd be very interested in seeing Pagestream 3, ImageFX 2.0, Lightwave, any of the most recent graphics cards, Final Writer Release 3, Wordsworth 3.1, TurboCalc 2.0, Brilliance 2.0, Newtek's Flyer, and much more I'm sure. :-) If you have any of the above, I'd certainly appreciate you contacting me to set up a time to demo it. Of course I'm open to other products and suggestions as well. Those are just a few that I personally know I would want to see. That and more animations of course (Ed Serbe? Mark Landman? Anyone?). :-)
On the 8 bit side, contact myself or preferably Craig and we'll get you setup. Craig has done a fantastic job with the C64/128 SIG and I'm not about to get in his way. :-) I used to have a C64 and C128 so I know that they are viable machines for many people and hope to see some good showings at the meetings.
With the members currently in the club, I don't see a problem with reaching any of the goals listed. I've been a happy member of CUCUG for years and always seem to learn or see something new from others in the club. After being on the net for years now, I constantly read about other clubs across the country who are dead, disbanding, or on the edge. I'm not about to see this happen to CUCUG, which is part of the reason for me participating in a few of the demos in the last year. If you've got something to show, let us know! After all no matter how badly C= was run, they did produce the best computers on the market.
President Rollins opened the December 15th meeting with an introduction of CUCUG's officers. But, unlike the way he has done this duty throughout his tenure as President, he made a point of thanking each of the elected official for his help and friendship over the years, as he now prepares to leave office. Richard also made a special point of thanking Craig Kummerow and Kevin Hisel, unelected yet vital members of the CUCUG corps.
The floor was then opened for our Question and Answer Session.
Then the business of electing new officers for next year was conducted. Richard appointed Jon Sago and Bill Baxter as the Election Tellers. Kevin Hisel explained the Election Procedure and then opened the floor for further nominations. As there were none, the floor was closed and the ballots were then distributed. Despite the fact that only one candidate per office stood for election, ballots are handed out because write in candidates are allowed. The membership voted, the Tellers gathered the ballots and then retired to count them.
In the intervening time, Kevin Hisel presented the Library's new Amiga disks for this month.
CUCUGAMI #135: Attorney (a legal forms creator), Auto3D (a program to create 3D pictures; you need to be a tinkerer to get this one to work, but it's pretty neat), GnuChess (an Amiga port of chess from Unix; it plays very well), and CalDix (more accurate than the Pentium).
CUCUGAMI #136: 3DTicTacToe (You have to have the brain of Spock to win), Smoke'em Poker (a poker game with 6 players - Beerware - programmed in CanDo; you can set the sex, skill level, etc. of the other players; it names the hands you have - quite tutorial), and MathAttack (math problems for kids).
After Kevin's presentation the Election Tellers returned with the tallies. The slate of candidates was elected. The new officers of CUCUG for 1995 are:
President: Jim Huls
Vice President: David Witt
Treasurer: Mark Landman
Secretary: Kevin Hopkins
Corporation Agent: Jim Lewis
Richard Rollins thanked the Tellers and gave his parting speech, stating that he had enjoyed been President of CUCUG.
The floor was then turned over to Kevin Hisel, who read the proposed changes to CUCUG's By-Laws. Action will be taken on them at the January meeting.
Some of the programs we saw at least part of were Rise of the Robots and Cannon Fodder. A game Geoff spoke highly of was Super Stardust (PAL version), but as our large screen monitor doesn't show PAL (as Geoff had been informed, prior to the meeting), we were unable to see it.
More to Geoff's strength, as a disseminator of news, he told us that there is a trend of software manufacturers selling packages with multiple games in them. He made note of the Flashback Collections which contain five games for the price of one. He said of the new titles coming out there is a 60/40 percentage of PAL to NTSC video. Another combination package Geoff mentioned was Sim Classic. This contains Sim City, Sim Ant, and Sim Life. Other titles earning honorable mention were Alien Breed, Tower Assault,UFO - Enemy Unknown (an AGA or CD32 strategy game) and Jungle Strike.
The December meeting of the CUCUG executive board was held on Wednesday, December 21st at 7PM at Kevin Hisel's house (address and phone number, both in the book). Present at the meeting were: Richard Rollins, Dave Witt, Mike Latinovich, Jim Lewis, Jim Huls, Craig Kummerow, Emil Cobb, Kevin Hopkins, and Kevin Hisel. Due to a medical emergency, Mark Landman was unable to attend this meeting. Happily, Mark's wife was fine.
Richard Rollins: Richard began by personally thanking Jim Lewis, Craig Kummerow, Emil Cobb, Kevin Hisel and Kevin Hopkins, each in turn, for the years of support throughout his CUCUG presidency. He said it had been a lot of fun and he had enjoyed it. Jim Lewis spoke for everyone in returning the compliments back to Richard, thanking him for his many years of service to the club.
The ritual releasing all those serving in non-elected positions was performed. Presidential power changed hands from Richard Rollins to Jim Huls at 7:33:33 pm. Jim's first act as President was to reinstate all those serving in non-elected positions.
The first order of new business was to pick a meeting date for January. All the other third Thursday dates for 1995 were secured, but the January date had already been rented out. Discussion concluded that the usual meeting date should be bracketed by a day one way or the other, with the strongest desired date the Friday just after. [This is the date that has since been booked.] The next Board meeting will continue as has been established: the Wednesday following the General meeting. In January this will be the 25th.
There was a discussion of how the new postal rates will effect the club's finances. Kevin Hopkins said he was thinking of reducing the newsletter by a page to counter the rising rate by reducing printing costs. The consensus of the Board was that this was unnecessary.
Jim Lewis: Jim reported that the IRS wants more information before deciding our tax status.
Dave Witt: Reviewing the General Meeting, Dave said, "The meeting was there." He gave some insights as to why Geoff's performance was sub-standard.
Looking forward, Dave offered his assistance to the new President.
Mike Latinovich: Mike said, "Geoff's demo didn't do anything for me. He's not Jim Oldfield. Kevin's disk demo was good, as usual. Congratulations to the newly elected officials. Next year will be great."
Jim Huls: Jim said he had posted his goals for the coming year to the BBS and he hoped that everyone had seen them [see this item elsewhere in this issue]. He briefly reiterated what he had written. Principally, he doesn't want to change much. He wants to increase membership and the clubs funds. He also want to raise the net awareness of the membership and show them the benefits there are in that knowledge. He said, "This year is going to be a very big challenge." He also wanted to say that he has been very impressed by the efficiency of the behind the scenes activities within the club. Most members don't know all the work that gets done quietly on their behalf.
Jim made a few general comments on Geoff's demo.
He also said, "You will be hearing from me for help."
Kevin Hopkins: Kevin brought the discussion back to the subject of the January meeting. "We've decided on a date, but what are we going to do at that meeting?" This spawned a discussion. One Board member suggested Pagestream 3, but KH1 said the program is not stable. Jim Lewis will do a scanner program later in the year, but January is too soon. Other possible demos mentioned were Lynx, Vic Serbe doing Midi, networking and getting net literate. Some of these topics raised the problem of not having a working phone line out of the Bresnan Center. The suggestion was made that we could video tape a presentation of Lynx to get around the phone problem. Finally, it was decided to poll the members and see what they wanted to do. Craig laughed and said that the C64/128 SIG was going to do the same thing, have an organizational meeting. The Amiga SIG will follow up on this with a Q&A session with extended discussion of any topics members may bring up.
Kevin then distributed the mail and passed around the one newsletter he brought. He made note of the exploration of Lynx he had been doing in the last month.
Kevin Hisel: Disk sales this month were nominal. Kevin reported that BBS usage has been very low at 14.6%.
Craig Kummerow: Craig reported that he had brought two boxes of donated items to the December meeting and had done pretty well. He only has one box left. There were no takers on the hardware.
Craig reported that the club's A500 has now been passed to the care of Vice President Dave Witt. Craig now has possession of the A2000.
Craig requests C64/128 SIG members to bring ideas with them to the January meeting. The SIG will reattempt the BBS demo in February if we can arrange a phone line.
Emil Cobb: Emil reported that he had received another 1541 drive from Steve Gast.
Meetings are held the third Thursday of each month at 7:00 p.m. at the Bresnan Meeting Center in the Champaign Park District Headquarters (398-2591). The Center is located at 706 Kenwood, 1/2 block south of the corner of Kenwood and John Street, in west Champaign. Kenwood is the fourth south-bound street off of John as you are going west, after crossing Mattis. The Center is in the northwest corner of Centennial Park, northwest of Centennial High School.
ASCII text files of all recent Status Register newsletters are available for downloading on our BBS or our WWW site. Other user group newsletter editors may leave a comment to the BBS Sysop to request free access. To initiate a newsletter exchange, just send us your newsletter. As a matter of CUCUG policy, a newsletter exchange partner will be dropped after three months of no contact.
This newsletter was prepared with PageStream 2.22 on an Amiga 3000 25/100 and output to an HP Laserjet IIP plus. Pagestream was donated to CUCUG by Soft-Logik Publishing Corporation.
For further information, please attend the next meeting as our guest, or contact one of our officers(all at area code 217):
President: Jim Huls 892-8730 jhuls@cucug.org Vice-President: David Witt 684-2815 maddog@prairienet.org Secretary/Editor: Kevin Hopkins 356-5026 khopkins@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu Treasurer: Mark Landman 398-2910 mlandman@prairienet.org Corporate Agent: Jim Lewis 359-1342 jlewis@cucug.org Librarian/Sysop: Kevin Hisel 352-1002 khisel@cucug.org C64/128 SIG: Craig Kummerow 784-5919 cwkummer@prairienet.org Board Advisor: Richard Rollins 469-2616 RERollins@aol.com
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