The Pi held its monthly general meeting on Saturday, June 24, 2006 at our regular Reston, Virginia location. The Microsoft Innovation & Technology Center again provided superb facilities for our program. The meeting was not very well attended but, nonetheless, the agenda proved to be educational and entertaining for those attending. Three training sessions started the event, and they were followed by a presentation of the iRemember application from Doug Troxell of Intriguing Development, Inc. We ended with the usual giveaway session and some socializing at lunch.
Pat Fauquet, Tom Berens and Bob Jarecke each hosted a training session during the first portion of the meeting. These sessions lasted for an hour and then we broke to remove the room separators so we could host the featured presentation to the whole room.
Pat talked about common Mac problems, focusing on those connected to having too little RAM and not enough hard drive space. You can go to her Blog page at http://web.mac.com/patf for notes from her presentation: look under Solving Common Mac Problems - ”My computer freezes all the time.” In the meantime, Tom was doing his presentation on the ins and outs of creating a video presentation with an example production for his college reunion. The demonstration combined a montage of old photos with snippets of music from that era. Bob, with his sidekick Dick Rucker, went over the usual topic of “Logging onto the TCS.” Perhaps due to it being the third iteration of this session, the crowd thinned down to just a couple of members, but the topic generated plenty to talk about and the group filled its time productively.
Doug Troxell gave a very informative presentation about his company’s flagship application, iRemember. He demonstrated its superior capabilities and ease of use. He showed how, within minutes, you can take common pieces of memorabilia and build an impressive looking scrapbook page. I found it interesting how you can use a scanned image of a fabric swatch as the background for the scrapbook page; it looks like the real thing. Overall, I was impressed with the program’s user-friendliness and final product. iRemember could quickly find considerable use if someone is interested in turning their shoeboxes full of pictures and more into a beautiful book of memories to be displayed.
Doug proved to be a good presenter. He did a great job demonstrating his product and answering the many questions asked by the crowd. He finished his presentation by offering up a copy of iRemember as one of the two drawing prizes.
At the close of the presentation, the Pi President hosted the prize giveaways. Dick Nugent, who has developed a clever FileMaker 7 program that is used to log in all members in attendance, came forward. His program can also randomly selected the day’s prizewinners from the meeting list. Bud Uyeda was the lucky winner of the digital scrapbooking program, iRemember.
The second prize was a copy of Robin Williams’ Mac OS X Book, Panther edition. When the first name was drawn, the winner confessed they already had Mac OS X Tiger and graciously declined the prize, so we drew again. The same thing happened with the subsequent winner, so Bob Jarecke queried the audience for any Panther users. Two hands came up and we were just about to flip a coin when Bob brought up the fact that one of the potential winners was one of our newest and youngest members. He pointed out that Michael Tran, who is only fourteen, was fast becoming a Mac enthusiast - something Bob had learned when he talked with Michael’s father earlier. Bob asked the other member in contention for the prize if he would defer, and in another nice gesture he immediately agreed. Michael was handed the book and welcomed into the club with a round of applause.
With the meeting ending on a high note, we took the short walk into Reston Town Center for lunch. While at Panera Bread Company, we continued our socializing and discussed more Mac and Pi matters - what else?
Meeting brochure in JPEG or PDF.
