Item 54. Minutes of the Board Meeting of 5/11/93 John H. Remmers (remmers) Fri, Jun 4, 1993 (10:28). 90 lines, 6 responses. The meeting was called to order (by ceremonial gavel-banging) at 7:45 p.m. Board members attending: Valerie Mates [chair] (popcorn), Mike Smerza (morel), Dan Romanchik [treasurer] (danr), Marc Unangst (mju), Steve Andre (steve), John Remmers [secretary] (remmers). Absent: Meg Geddes (meg). Others attending: Dave Lovelace (davel), Rob Henderson (robh), TS Taylor (tsty), Pattie Snyder-Rayl (pegasus), Bill Rayl (pegasus), Mary Remmers (chelsea). Treasurer's report (danr): Dan Romanchik reported that the treasury balance is $551.93, counting memberships, the phone line fund, and payments for Grex t-shirts. Hardware committee (steve, mju, tsty): Another Eagle drive has been installed on Grex, after passing 24 hours of diagnostic tests, and is being used for Usenet News. The increased disk space will permit a 4-day retirement schedule for news articles. Lately the drive has been generating unusual errors, such as taking itself offline for 2.5 hours. In view of this, the drive's behavior will be monitored closely. Two 80-meg drives previously in use have been retired. These drive changes have doubled disk space but entail an 200-watt increase in electricity consumption, costing Grex $16 per month more in electric bills. Memory has been reduced from 5 to 4 mb due to memory errors. The causes of the errors are still under investigation. The tape unit attached to the Sun can't read what it has written when used at 1600 bpi, but works correctly at 800 bpi. The problem may be in the disk controller card. A Sola 900-watt power conditioner was acquired at the Dayton swap for $45; the new Eagle drive is being run on this. (The conditioner originally cost $900-$1000 new.) STeve arrived late (and breathless) from Communications Electronics, reporting that Grex is down. He has diagnosed the Eagle problem as electrical interference between cables. Many files were lost on the news partition. fsck is running and STeve will go back to CE later tonight to try to get Grex back up. He plans to give the Eagle two more days on line, and if problems persist drop back to the two 80-meg drives previously in use. There are other Eagles in the "aerie" to try out. Pattie Snyder-Rayl (pegasus) has donated a 2400-baud Supra modem to Grex. (Thanks Pattie!) TS Taylor is working on the disk donated by Dave Parks. If it passes diagnostic tests it will be tried out on Grex and may be used as the boot disk. It is 60 mb larger than the current one. Phone line fund: Donations exceeded somewhat the cost of the one additional line installed; the excess will be held and earmarked for another line. 501(c)(3): Valerie will retrieve the forms from McNally. There was brief discussion on possible strategies for organizing the application effort. T-Shirts: Of the two designs submitted, the Board endorsed the "dictionary" design. Dan is ready to proceed with obtaining the t-shirts. New Business: STeve re-iterated that Grex needs to move to another location for better access to the hardware. Remmers will arrange for a table for the June 27 JCC sale and investigate the possibility of obtaining a phone hookup so that Grex can be demonstrated during the sale. Valerie will donate the cost of an ad for Grex in the "Connect" magazine. Dan hopes to revive the Grex manual effort. Marc discussed the possibility of an on-line tutorial; implementation may require modifications to Picospan. Mary R. reported on a possible high school outreach program involving the proposed new alternative high school. Adjournment: It occurred via ceremonial gavel-banging, as usual. Respectfully submitted, John H. Remmers, secretary