Our speaker is Alnisa Allgood, a general technologist who is interested in providing tech services to nonprofits. She is the founder and director of Nonprofit Tech, and is active in Mad Tech and the Web608 group. She comes to us from San Francisco, and now she is a Madisonian. She has led workshops on topics such as using Facebook for nonprofits.
Thanks to Eric Selje,
the Sybase Corporation is coming to Madison
to show us their products, including the Advantage Database Server, and to show
how well it works with Visual FoxPro tables. This will be a combined meeting of
the MadFox Group and MPCUG!
Hopefully, the entire MadFox group can make it to this meeting, as a) It
would give them a good turnout, and b) this Advantage Database Server product
they have is very intriguing. And priced very competitively.
At our next general meeting, Preston Austin of imby will be presenting. imby stands for "In My Back Yard." The web tool is at http://madison.imby.info. Come by and check it out! Register on imby. It looks like it will be very useful for members of our group who should all try it. Free, fully transparent, locally focused, and highly useful are the watchwords for this service that encourages local networking, professionally focused.
Virtually all professionals seek to connect and network with other professionals in their local community - regardless of how actively they network with distant markets.
imby is built to allow professionals to optimize their local efforts via the efficiencies that have made globalized efforts possible, to do so without creating a local "closed garden", without asking users to sacrifice any of the power or reach of the services they have already adopted.
The General Meeting topic this month will be Windows 7:
Will Windows 7 shore up the reputation of Microsoft, which generally suffered from the introduction of Vista?
Will people be motivated to buy new hardware if it has Windows 7 on it?
What are the new features of Windows 7, and are they worth it?
Lots of businesses and enterprises preferred to stay with the Win XP platform rather than risk problems upgrading to Vista. Some even "downgraded" to XP from Vista. Could this be the last gasp of the sovereignty of the Microsoft OS - will people be using applications and OS delivered over the web? Well, maybe we won't cover that final question. Our own Garth Yeazel has gotten his hands on a preview copy of Windows 7, and he will share his insights with us.
A historical perspective and overview of Microsoft Windows, from 1.0 to 7.0.
The subject of the July meeting presentation is "Working in an SQL Sweatshop." The presenter is Dan Eater, local IT worker who has been in the field for some 25 years. He has worked as a Systems Analyst with the State of Wisconsin, first for the Food Stamp program, and then for the Low Income Energy Assistance Program. He is also an accomplished science fiction and fantasy writer, winning the Writers of the Future award in 1999. He will share his insights and his stories with us to give us an idea of what a career in IT is all about.
Mr. Frederick Baguhn will be talking about the intersection of ham radio and personal computing. He is the President of the Madison Area Repeater Association, and was an original member of the Madison PC Users Group at the beginning. Among Mr. Baguhn's topics of discussion will be an introduction to ham radio, the use of personal computers in ham radio, bouncing radio waves off of meteor trails high in earth's atmosphere, and introductions to Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and software defined radio (SDR). We look forward to a very informative and lively meeting.
Our presenter for this month, is Mr. Bulut Nesim. He comes from an engineering background, but his work has been in the IT trenches He worked for Lotus, and then when IBM acquired Lotus, he became a worker for IBM. He has been working from a remote location - specifically his home in Madison. He will talk to us about what it is like to work in the corporate IT world via telecommuting; and he will share his thoughts on collaborative technology and what the future holds.
Daniel Guerra of Argus Ventures will be presenting what is new with Argus. He and Alex Provan were presenters about 2 years ago. Argus specializes in web development and internet marketing services, offering competitive rates and outstanding results. Aside from offering excellent service, they are an active member in the Madison area community, involved with multiple non-profit organizations. On April 20th 2007 Argus received certification from the State of Wisconsin as a Minority Business Enterprise. Argus was also a recipient of a 2007 Dane County Small Business Award.
The company consists of divisions Argus Creative, Argus Hosting, Argus Invent, and Argus Financing. They are adept at helping businesses reduce costs, increase sales, solve problems and achieve goals using web technology & marketing. They have developed solutions for a variety of businesses, with a high degree of customer satisfaction.
This month's presentation will be by Will Miller of Raven Computers. They have opened a new storefront at the corner of Gilman and State Street. Inside are a few neon-lit examples of state-of-the-art top end computer systems, and also a nice comfortable sofa. On the walls, you will find strange and beautiful art works. Service Manager Will Miller will talk about the new storefront opening, and how a small computer hardware and services store can survive and thrive in a world of huge national chains of stores. Of course, CompUsa closed their stores, and now Circuit City is closing too. I've asked Will to talk about his experiences in the business, and about some entertaining dealings with computer users. He can also tell us about how to make sense of the various specs for new systems - what do the numbers mean, and what these rigs can do for you.
Social Networking - What is it?
Many of us are linked into various social networks on the Web. There are a host of such sites out there. Most of us who came to the world of personal computers from the days when data was the main thing computers were used for, are not so used to social networking. Granted, there were dial-in BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) where one could build a sense of community with others who were users of certain computing platforms or computer software. And then there were communities of people online with similar interests. Nowadays, social networking systems have evolved to allow much richer features in linking with other people. Bhim Nimgade of the MPCUG will present the world of social networking today. He has diligently sought technical information from people of younger generations for whom this stuff is second nature. He will look at the advantages and also the pitfalls of these new uses of technology.
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