San Jose IBM PC Club 2004 Calendar

Board meetings are held in the SVL Lobby Conference Room 017 on the first Tuesday of each month at 5:00 PM. General meetings are held in the SVL Cafeteria Room K222 on the second Tuesday of each month at 5:00 PM.   All members are welcome and encouraged to attend.
Board Meetings General Meetings General Meeting Topics
January 6, 2004 
Board Meeting
January 13, 2004 
General Meeting
Kaye MacKenzie, President of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Camera Club & SeniorNet Instructor, will give a presentation on portraits with a digital camera.  Kaye will explain what digital does for portraits, setting up a camera for a digital session, and how to setup for the best picture.  Some of the items to be discussed include the digital downside; setting up a camera; contrast, sharpness & saturation; color management profile; image quality of stored images; raw image format; quality of light by program mode; scenes/program modes; program auto-exposure; and white balance.
February 3, 2004 
Board Meeting
February 10, 2004 
General Meeting
Leslie Latham, VP of Product Marketing at Mirra Inc., will give a presentation on the Mirra Personal Server which backs up files every time you save or create files.  The Mirra Personal Server is the easiest way to back up, remotely access, and securely share your important digital files, photos, and email; and it is perfect for a small office or home because it is easy to set up and easier to use. The Mirra Personal Server solution consists of a hardware appliance with a hard drive, the Mirra PC software,  and the Mirra Web service.  For more information go to http://www.mirra.com/.
March 2, 2004 
Board Meeting
March 9, 2004 
General Meeting
Mike Langberg, Mercury News Personal Technology Editor, will give a presentation titled "What's New in Digital Technology for Consumers". His reviews of new electronic products and services appear each week in the Personal Technology section of the Mercury News.  Laptop computers, multi-featured mobile phones and digital entertainment products will top consumers' buying lists over the next year, according to a market research firm.  For information on recent articles by Mike Langberg, go to http://www.langberg.com
April 6, 2004 
Board Meeting
April 13, 2004 
General Meeting
Albert Hoagland , Director of the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center at Santa Clara University, will give a presentation titled "The Early History of Magnetic Disk Storage".  Al served as Director for Technical Planning for the IBM Research Division, and he helped establish the first University Centers in data storage technology.  He left IBM to establish the Institute for Information Storage Technology (IIST) in 1984 and founded the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center in 2001.  Topics to be covered include an overview of the information storage timeline, the beginning of magnetic disk storage in the 1950’s (RAMAC, 1301, 1311), 50 years of progress, and history and the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center.  For more information, go to http://www.mdhc.scu.edu/mdhc
May 4, 2004 
Board Meeting
May 11, 2004 
General Meeting
Eric Baker, San Jose IBM PC Club Technical Support Member, will give a presentation on RAID for PC backup.  Topics to be covered include the concept and theory of RAID, hardware implementations of RAID from desktop PCs to servers, the use of RAID and how it all applies to your computer.  RAID is a way of storing the same data in different places on multiple hard disks. By placing data on multiple disks, I/O operations can overlap in a balanced way, improving performance. Since multiple disks increases the mean time between failure, storing data redundantly also increases fault-tolerance.  For information about RAID, see http://www.ahinc.com/raid.htm#RAID%201.
June 1, 2004 
Board Meeting
June 8, 2004 
General Meeting
Bob Stephens, an IBM Retiree and SeniorNet instructor, will give a presentation on digital video processing that covers the required equipment, software, and connectivity.  Digital Video processing requires taking raw video and transforming it into a good viewing experience.  The technology of  Digital Video (DV) camcorders has also brought the video quality for the consumer up  to the level of broadcast video. With a simple analog converter, today's PC's can also process analog video from analog camcorders, TVs, and VHS recorders; and a variety of output options are possible.  To view the presentation, go to http://www.sjpc.org/presentations/digitalvideo.htm.
July 6, 2004 
Board Meeting
July 13, 2004 
General Meeting
Walt Cole, Club President, will give a presentation on a Garmin Forerunner 201 GPS receiver.  The receiver fits on your wrist, and it collects and stores latitude, longitude, elevation and time data several times a minute after you hit the stop-watch-styled start button. Via a serial RS-232 interface, it transfers the data to your PC. The downloaded software, "Forerunner Logbook," stores and displays the data. It can also export the data to an XML file. This file (like an HTML file) can be viewed with any text editor/viewer. With a Perl (the programming language) script, the data can be converted to a latitude and longitude comma-separated-variable (CSV) file. This can be imported into the TOPO! program which overlays it on a topographic map. For more information, see  http://www.garmin.com/products/forerunner201/
August 3, 2004 
Board Meeting
August 10, 2004 
General Meeting
John Hogle, freelance academic librarian working in community college libraries, will give a presentation on Internet Searching Tools and Techniques.  The subjects to be covered include basic structure and functioning of databases and Internet search tools; nature and use of Boolean logic and other search functions, operators, and methods; how to search the Internet through the use of search engines and other tools; evaluating documents for relevancy, authority, content accuracy, motive, and ease of use; range of subject resources on the Internet; range of formats of information on the Internet; nature of the controversial issues relating to the Internet and information; tenets and importance of information competency; and basics of copyright, fair use, and plagiarism.
September 7, 2004 
Board Meeting
September 14, 2004 
General Meeting
Gene Barlow, user group educator and writer, will give a presentation on SecureClean, MoveMe, and TrueImage programs.  SecureClean prevents personal and private information from building up on your hard drive by writing blanks or zeros over deleted information.  MoveMe helps users easily transfer all of their application programs, settings and data files from an old computer to their newer computer.  True Image creates full backups, incremental backups, and performs restores from the backed up data.  Gene Barlow has conducted his business over the years mainly with user groups.  He has represented many vendors over the years with products that he finds valuable and effective for home and small business users.  For more information on his own User Group Store, go to http://www.usergroupstore.com.
October 5, 2004 
Board Meeting
October 12, 2004 
General Meeting
Business and information exchange meeting with no speaker due to lack of speaker confirmation.
November 2, 2004 
Board Meeting
November 9, 2004 
General Meeting
John Zimmerman, Club Membership Chairman, will describe and demonstrate some of the features of Adobe Photoshop Elements.  Adobe Photoshop Elements is an affordable, easy-to-use digital imaging program, designed for amateur photographers and photo hobbyists who want to create high-quality images.  After retirement from IBM, John joined the Light & Shadow Camera Club in 1995.  In recent years, he has moved from darkrooms and chemical processing to the digital world of Photoshop.  Although he uses Photoshop version 5.0 for most of his work, he will be using Photoshop Elements 2.0 to demonstrate it's capabilities in creating a collage print from a number of individual photographs. For more information, go to  http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshopelwin/overview.html.
December 7, 2004 
Board Meeting
December 14, 2004 
General Meeting
The business portion of the meeting will include the election of PC Club Officers for 2005.  Members who wish to show their favorite photographs at the meeting should bring  a CD containing the photographs in jpeg format so that they can be displayed on the large rear projection screen.  Please limit the number of photographs that you plan to show to ten.  This will be followed by a buffet.  Please come out and vote and consider making other nominations.  If you do not wish to become an officer, consider volunteering for one of the other positions shown at http://www.sjpc.org/contrib.htm.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.