From The President November 2020

David Stonier-Gibson

Committee changes

There have been a couple of changes in the committee. Kirsten Greed and Aavon Fernando have resigned. The committee voted unanimously to appoint Peter Boin and Aidan Kelly to serve in the period until the deferred elections and AGM.

Transition to Google

The transition to Google Workspace (formerly G-Suite) continues. It is definitely going slower than we had anticipated, due largely to there being more permutations of email setups, and attendant complexities, than we had anticipated. However, the transition team is getting through it, and the feedback from members has been on a whole positive and encouraging. Here are some examples:

My thanks to the team for performing a huge effort

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Dear Team,

I have followed your instructions and now appear to be successfully migrated to Google.

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All is good

I really appreciated your excellent help

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Hi team,

Thanks, my transition to G Suite went pretty smoothly.

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Transition Team

My email has successfully migrated from Office 365 to G-Suite.

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Thank you for all your good works. I am happy with my new Gmail setup and have stopped using the old Outlook.

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Club rooms modernisation

With the relaxing of lockdown 2 or 3 people were able to enter the Moorabbin club rooms last week and make a start on remodelling the lounge area. The first step is/was to remove the power points from the wall out to the atrium, in preparation for removing the panelling and opening up the windows to let in natural light.

Museum

We now have a substantial collection of old computer and related hardware. The latest acquisition is that we have been promised a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) Micro-VAX computer. DEC was arguably the company that contributed the most to making computers affordable to smaller companies and scientific organisations, by way of the mini-computer. The VAX family was the last of the line, so has great historical significance.

The Micro-VAX will be in addition to a working PDP8 simulator.

Zoom and SIG accessibility

We are on the verge of a situation where the Zoom addresses for all SIG meetings will be stable and known well in advance. This will allow us to set up a system whereby all members can be notified of all online SIG meetings well in advance. I have in mind a weekly email bulletin to all members with notices of upcoming meetings. Tim McQueen has been posting notices on Yammer and FaceBook, but without URLs. In the near future he will be able to include Zoom URLs in the member-only channels.

It is the right of all members to attend all SIG meetings, irrespective of whether or not they have signed up for a particular SIG. Having virtual meetings makes it much more possible for that to happen. The challenge is getting the notices and URLs out there. We are now very close to having that ability.