[GLLUG] Meeting Thursday, August 24

[Charles Ulrich]

Thomas Hruska wrote:
> Also, the content should be relevant to what people in the group need. 
> Take the firewall-based OSes topic night we recently had.  Sure it was 
> interesting, but was it useful and relevant to what people _needed_? 
> Probably not.  What might have been more useful would have been to walk 
> through the steps to set up a firewall but open, say, port 80 and set up 
> Apache.  Now, that's simple to do and someone here will tell me to 
> search for 'ipchains howto' and 'apache howto' on Google, but my point 
> is that the latter is more likely to be relevant to group members.  Or, 
> take the "backups" night we just had.  Talking about backups is 
> different from actually helping people set up their systems to do 
> regular backups.  People are resistant to change - especially when 
> things _seem_ to be fine as-is.  How many people here started doing 
> regular backups as a result of the topic night discussion?  Answer: 
> Maybe one person.  The rest of us mentally said, "backups are good." I'm 
> not saying the presentation wasn't informative - it was.  It just wasn't 
> interactive.  Well, it was sort of interactive, but it wasn't at the 
> same time.  Does that make sense?

It makes sense, however as a group, we're trying to cater to Linux users 
at every experience level. From the newbies that ask, "Linux? That's a 
kind of Windows, right?" all the way up to gurus who debug virtual 
memory managers in their sleep. We need Linux users of all types, as 
well as meeting topics of all types. Ocassionaly we get a situation 
where we get one type of presentation but a different type of audience 
shows up. That's unfortunate, but bound to happen.

Indeed. My intention is to follow through with the Installfest and, to 
the extent possible, keep September mainly dedicated to our beginners 
and new Linux users.

-- 
Charles Ulrich
Ideal Solution, LLC -- http://www.idealso.com