Item 139. Grex Board of Directors Meeting Minutes - November 1999 Jan Wolter (janc) Sat, Nov 20, 1999 (20:50). 144 lines, 17 responses. Cyberspace Communications November 1999 - Board of Director's Meeting Minutes Presiding: John Remmers (remmers) Recording: Jan Wolter (janc) Other Board Members Present: Mark Conger (aruba) Scott Helmke (scott) Dan Gryniewicz (dang) Steve Andre (steve) - Arriving Late Misti Tucker (mta) - Arriving Late Members of the Public: Eric Bassey (other) Steve Gibbard (scg) Meg Heberlein (eeyore) Valerie Mates (valerie) Arlo Mates (arlo) Mary Remmers (mary) Mark's friend Carol Board Members Absent: none AGENDA ITEM 1: Gavel Banging - John Remmers began the meeting at 7:08pm. AGENDA ITEM 2: Chairman's Report "Nope." AGENDA ITEM 3: Treasurer's Report - Mark Conger presented the treasurer's report for October. The full report is available on-line in coop item 134. * September was a good month. Total Income: $725.20 Total Expenses: $468.15 New Members: 3 * We ended the month with 93 members, 82 of which are fully paid up. * Our bank balance ended at $5,453.06. - Mark Conger presented a preliminary report for November. Doesn't look great, but Novemeber is usually a slow month. The expenses will be higher than usual because they include the credit card application fee of $175. Income to Date: $188.02 Expenses to Date: $627.75 New Members to Date: 2 - Mark sold 8 handbooks to Jim Deigart (jdeigart). - The credit card application will be sent out as soon as we find the envelope (or at least the address). - Mark repaired Grex's copy machine. - The auction will be starting soon. - Mark will be setting up a money market account, so we can get better interest on our savings. - Mark is developing an auction handbook. AGENDA ITEM 4: Publicity Committee Report - Scott Helmke gave a one wallet-card flyer to someone. Everyone else has forgotten that these exist. AGENDA ITEM 5: Technical Committee Report - Scott Helmke will be taking Grex down for a backup soon. - Jan Wolter ran some statistics that suggest that we could cut another dial-in without adding many busy tones. - The /c drive is still suspect and still needs to be replaced. - Our newest staff member, Michelangelo Giansiracusa (mic), has been doing useful stuff. Yeah, mic! - An login name formerly belonging to a deceased user (biogal) has been retired after someone recreated it and sent tasteless messages. - There are still spotty reports about problems on the dial-in modems. We haven't been able to figure out much of a pattern, or reproduce the problems. Scott Helmke continues to monitor things. - STeve Andre arrived after the end of the technical committee report but added two notes. He wanted to think whomever recently deposited several nice NPI SCSI disk enclosures, a tape drive, some S-Bus SCSI controllers, and some 486 motherboards in the pumpkin (Grex's machine room). Nobody knew who had done this. Apparantly the pumpkin has been visited by the disk enclosure fairy. - STeve Andre also discussed options of disposing of our old Sun 3 chassis. It was suggested that Cindi Keesan, and Jim Deigart might have more knowledge about recycling junk computers from their work with Kiwanas. AGENDA ITEM 6: Lease Renewal - Our lease says we must give 4 months notice if we want to renew our lease, which ends in June, so we need to give notice in January. - Mark Conger moves That we renew our lease under the terms of the current lease agreement. I forgot who seconded. Passed 5-0-0 (STeve and Misti not yet arrived). AGENDA ITEM 7: New Business - The board will discuss whether or not to cut another dial-in phone line at the next meeting, allowing time for further on-line discussion. - Nominations for the Y2K Grex board have closed with 7 excellent candidates (none of whom have ever served on the board before). - There will be a Potluck and Future Planning Meeting at the home of Mark Conger on Sunday, November 21. The potluck will start at 5pm, the meeting will start at 6pm. All are invited. - The final Grex board meeting of the millenium will be held on Wednesday, December 15 at 7:30pm at Zingermans. - There was some discussion of a deal that Arbornet is considering where Amazon.com gives non-profits a bit of money on book purchases made by people who access Amazon via there site. Enthusiasm was minimal to non-existant. Seems like it wouldn't bring much money and it smells like advertising. Needs discussion on-line. AGENDA ITEM 10: Gavel Cessation - John Remmers ended the meeting at 7:54pm (a 46 minute meeting, wow!) 17 responses total. ---------- (139) #1 Daniel B Velleman (orinoco) Sat, Nov 20, 1999 (21:05). 2 lines. (Count me as another person who's forgotten that the wallet card fliers exist. What are they?) ---------- (139) #2 C. S. McGee (cmcgee) Sat, Nov 20, 1999 (22:21). 3 lines. As someone who clearly supported getting us into the "credit-card-accepting" business, I will donate $10 toward the initial fee for doing so. Anyone else want to help out on this one-time expense? ---------- (139) #3 Steve Gibbard (scg) Sun, Nov 21, 1999 (00:19). 2 lines. I need to post the opposite of my usual objection to the minutes. ;) This time I completely forgot about the meeting, so I wasn't there. ---------- (139) #4 Marcus Watts (mdw) Sun, Nov 21, 1999 (05:11). 5 lines. I wondered when someone would notice. The tape drive has a broken door but could be good for parts, or could be sent in to be fixed if this is thought useful. I can't explain any 486 motherboards, but I do have the serial I/O panel that belongs to to the high speed serial interface sbus card that STeve missed. ---------- (139) #5 Tim P. Ryan (tpryan) Sun, Nov 21, 1999 (17:23). 1 line. December 15, 2000 is a Friday not Wednesday. ---------- (139) #6 Don Joffe (don) Sun, Nov 21, 1999 (17:24). 2 lines. Just out of curiosity, what would be the technical aspect of retiring "an" login? ---------- (139) #7 Marcus Watts (mdw) Sun, Nov 21, 1999 (22:00). 3 lines. Well, the *right* way is to add it to /var/adm/badnames . The *wrong* way is to add it to /etc/aliases. Both will cause newuser to refuse to issue the loginid, but only the former causes mail sent to it to bounce. ---------- (139) #8 Big Snauf (lilmo) Tue, Nov 23, 1999 (17:39). 5 lines. Re #5: Hear, hear! Re #2: As soon as it is up! Re #4: So, are you the fairy, marcus? ---------- (139) #9 C. Keesan (keesan) Wed, Nov 24, 1999 (16:32). 5 lines. The bank money market fund is not feasible, that at PAX pays 4.86%. Bank of Ann Arbor also has passbook savings at 4% as opposed to 1.7% or so for money market. The correct spellings are deigert/jdeigert and sindi. Kiwanis might possibly have some use for 486DX50 or faster boards and can recycle anything else not wanted but first please stick in it classifieds or auction. ---------- (139) #10 Steven R. Weiss (srw) Sun, Nov 28, 1999 (13:11). 7 lines. I want to post a correction to the minutes, but resp:5 shows that Tim observed this first. The millenium has another year to run, so the meeting on Dec 15 is probably in 1999, and not the final one of the millenium, which is possibly going to happen on Dec 13, 2000, but the schedule could change. The meeting coming up will be the last one before Y2K, but Y2K is the last year of the current millenium, despite what they say on TV and in the papers. ---------- (139) #11 David Cahill (dpc) Mon, Nov 29, 1999 (14:03). 1 line. Yes, indeed, srw! ---------- (139) #12 Big Snauf (lilmo) Thu, Dec 2, 1999 (16:28). 2 lines. We seem to have come to a consensus. It is time to announce our decision ot the world. ---------- (139) #13 (still a) Wing Nut (hhsrat) Sun, Dec 5, 1999 (10:30). 4 lines. >- Our newest staff member, Michelangelo Giansiracusa (mic), has been >doing useful stuff. Yeah, mic! Anyone care to elaborate on "useful stuff"? ---------- (139) #14 Scott Helmke (scott) Sun, Dec 5, 1999 (11:02). 2 lines. Mostly handling stuff like finding loose disk space to reclaim and handling similar tasks. Stuff that most of the rest of staff already burned out on. ---------- (139) #15 Michelangelo Giansiracusa (spooked) Sun, Dec 5, 1999 (19:39). 6 lines. And, deleting user accounts on their request, answering some e-mails to staff from users, and stuff like that. I'm not so sure it's that other staff are burned out - they probably don't have as much time on their hands, as I did (or do) presently. It'll fluctuate, but I'll help out wherever possible because Grex means a lot to me (and it's a high honour for me to be entrusted with this position). ---------- (139) #16 C. Keesan (keesan) Mon, Dec 6, 1999 (16:26). 1 line. Are you doing this from Australia? ---------- (139) #17 Michelangelo Giansiracusa (spooked) Mon, Dec 6, 1999 (18:51). 1 line. Yes, Grex's budget is a little low for transport allowance (=