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VOL. 28 – No. 11 News of the Portland PC Users Group December 09

Portland Computing Portland PC Users Group

Inside this issue

PPCUG Calendar of Events ...... 2

Maps & Directions ................ 3-4

President’s Report ................... 4

FUD’s Follies ........................ 4-7

The Back Page .......................... 8

December General Meeting:

Tuesday, December 8th

7:15pm - 9:15pm

Gateway Elks Lodge 711 NE 100th Avenue

Cascade Room

See map and directions on Page 3

This Month’s Agenda:

The Latest in Digital Photography

Ritz Photo

Lloyd Center

Will speak on the latest trends in consumer cameras

DOOR PRIZES Get a ticket for just showing up

Wear your name tag and get an extra ticket

Bring a friend for the first time and get an extra ticket

Find the secret word in this newsletter for an extra ticket

Buy extra tickets for $1.00 each

Q & A — Answers to your computer problems

Door Prizes at closing

Know the secret phrase and get an additional ticket

Join us for a great evening!

December 09

Portland PC Users Group Portland Computing

PPCUG calendar of events

1st Tuesday — Computer Aided Investing SIG 2nd Tuesday — General Meeting 2nd Tuesday — Board Meeting 2nd Saturday — Wildcard SIG 3rd Saturday — Audio/Visual SIG 4th Saturday — Hardware SIG & Linux/PDA SIG 4th Wednesday — POLUG SIG

December 2009

Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat

1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

December 1st

Tuesday 6:00 pm

Computer Aided Investing SIG NW Branch Library

2300 NW Thurman St

Sr. René Foster [email protected]

For people who have an interest in Conversations About Investing, like to monitor

them and use a computer to get information.

December 2nd

Wednesday 10:00 am

POLUG SIG Concordia University

2811 NE Holman Street

Beverly Walker [email protected]

For people who have an interest in genealogy using Legacy software. See the web site at:

www.legacyfamilytree.com

December 8th

Tuesday 7:15 pm

General Meeting Gateway Elks Lodge

711 NE 100th St

Dean La Voie [email protected]

Regular General Meeting. Guest Speakers, Q&A, Door Prizes. See our web site at: www.ppcug.org

December 8th

After General Meeting

Board Meeting Gateway Elks Lodge

711 NE 100th St

Dean La Voie [email protected]

Regular Board Meeting. Planning of our next General Meeting.

All members welcome.

December 12th

Saturday 10:00 am

Wildcard SIG Legacy Emanuel Hospital

501 N Graham Street

Speaker Varies [email protected]

Instructional session for programs of interest. Learn how to use the features of the programs

selected.

No Meeting in

December

Audio/Visual SIG Legacy Emanuel Hospital

501 N Graham Street

Mike Hazlett [email protected]

The Audio/Visual SIG covers a wide range of topics about Audio and Visual software,

hardware and resources.

No Meeting in

December

Hardware SIG Legacy Emanuel Hospital

501 N Graham Street

Gralof De Vries [email protected]

Please arrange with Gralof to have your hardware problem or upgrade the topic of the

next SIG meeting. This is a hands-on experience.

No Meeting in

December

LINUX/PDA SIG McCoy Academy

3802 NE MLK Jr Blvd

Douglas Howard [email protected]

[email protected]

Learn and discuss various LINUX distributions and many Open Source (free) applications.

Any handheld devices. PDAs, music players, cell phones.

December 09


Maps & Directions

General Meeting Gateway Elks Lodge 711 NE 100th Avenue

From I-205, take the Glisan Street exit and go East, then turn left at NE 99th Street.

The Lodge and parking lot are on the Northeast corner at NE Irving Street & NE 99th Street. Cascade Room Down the stairs, turn left, down the hall, and turn left again.

Linux/PDA SIG McCoy Academy 3802 NE MLK Jr. Blvd

Park in lot or on street

Enter door at back of parking lot, down the hall, turn right, first door on left / first door on right.

Wildcard, Audio/Visual, and Hardware SIGs Meeting Place Legacy Emanuel Hospital 501 N Graham Street

Park in Parking Structure 2, South side of Graham Street

Enter at Emanuel Medical Office entrance, take elevator to 4th floor, turn right, take walking bridge to other side, turn right, then left at end of hall, look for room 4128 on left.

McCoy Academy 3802 NE MLK Jr. Blvd

Gateway Elks Lodge 711 NE 100th Avenue

Legacy Emanuel Hospital 501 N Graham Street Portland, OR 97227

December 09


POLUG SIG Concordia University George R. White Library 2811 NE Holman Street

Room 300 (Center for Volga German Studies) in SE corner of the 3rd floor of the George R. White Library Building.

President’s Report, December 09 It looks like we made it through another year. Congratulations to all that are reading this. We have a Christmas season warming up and it looks brighter, at least to me. The employment picture looks like it will tread water for about a year. Remember, last year there was no prediction of the future and, thus, no one taking chances. This year, those that have formulated plans that match a stagnant economy will start progressing with those plans.

Although Windows 7 release hasn’t been a barn-burner, it has been an easy adaption in computer/electronics stores. More people than expected upgraded their computers, but I suppose that is typical of people that already had a computer with enough horsepower to run it okay. Many are satisfied with XP and will wait until they feel the need to blow a wad of cash. This will probably happen over the next couple years.

Those with an HDTV, even if on a budget, will probably add a gadget or two. The most obvious is a blu-ray player, which would replace your DVD and CD player. Another simple goody would be a flip video recorder or the latest iPod Nano with video. There are a lot of simple still cameras that feature video this year, also. I expect high-res webcams like the Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 to continue to rise in popularity. Do you see a pattern here? 2010 will continue to promote moving images and people will become accustomed to having them as part of their daily life. The multimedia experience promised by Windows 95 is beginning to happen for real.

Our speaker from Ritz Camera should be able to bring us up to speed on simple still cameras that also do video and even HD video. See you there!

Have a Happy New Year!

Dean La Voie

PPCUG President

FUD’s Follies

Twas The Night Before Christmas ‘09 FUD had finished his holiday chores. He had called the relatives who were out of town. He had re-distributed some old clothing to friends and Good Will. He had bought a meager few gifts for loved ones. And he had bought some Christmas blend coffee and ale and some nuts and oranges. He got a fruitcake because he was one of the few people in the world who liked them, especially with a little butter on top.

But, only because it was the night before Christmas, he splurged and turned up the heat and turned out the lights, except for the tree lights and turned on the TV to watch his holiday favorite – the view of the hearth at

Concordia University 2811 NE Holman Street Portland, OR 97211

December 09


Timberline lodge. The fire crackled and the traditional carols played in the background over his sound system. With light down low he could barely make out the small stack of presents under the tree. The pungent smell of the fresh-cut noble fir filled the room as he drifted off to sleep in his dad’s hand-me-down recliner.

Ghost of Christmas Past There was a knock at the door. A young curly headed kid with a beard was standing there in the doorway. There was snow melting on his hair and he had a crummy coat and his Nike Cortez cross-country trainers had seen better days.

VISITOR: “Just thought I’d come and visit you, Pops. They don’t have classes and the ’59 Karman Ghia has good tires, so I drove up.”

FUD: “I think you have me mistaken for someone else. I don’t have any kids in school. You do remind me of what I was like when I was your age, though. Tell me when you will graduate?”

VISITOR: “Sure, I’ll play along, dad. Are you going to invite me in, it’s cold out here! I’ll graduate in ’79.”

FUD: (matter-of-factly) “I thought I recognized you. I won’t bother offering you some warm decaf made in the French press. Here’s a bottle of Blitz I’ve been saving in the back of the fridge for a few years. What’r ya studying? “

VISITOR: “FORTRAN. It’s totally taking over where BASIC and assembler can’t go.”

FUD: “Well, a lot will happen to computer languages in the next thirty years. FORTRAN will end up mainly in research machines. BASIC will evolve and always have a place for simple tasks once they develop compiled versions. Assembly language is a good base skill. It will evolve from eight bit to eventually sixty-four bit, but that kind of programming is highly specialized these days. The thing that will totally take over is C.”

VISITOR: “What?”

FUD: “Well, after Pascal runs its course as a training language, supposedly replacing BASIC, C will evolve though C+, then C++ and now C#. It will be the fundamental development language for operating systems and most applications.”

VISITOR: “Hold on there, Pops. Star Trek has long since finished it’s ‘five year mission’, cut short after three seasons in 1969. So, whatever Vulcan mind trick you’re trying to pull, it’s been long forgotten with the days of disco and the advance of cassette tapes. Speaking of such, do you have a cassette connected to your micro?”

FUD: “No, my microwave oven uses a digital clock to time the cooking.”

VISITOR: “No! I mean microcomputer! Don’t they have micro’s in my future?”

FUD: “Oh! You have no idea how they’ve taken off. You see, what happened is the “Computer Age” died out and the “Information age” totally took over. The transformation took about ten years for reporters to stop talking about ‘the computer’ and for the guy in the junk yard to talk about his ‘personal computer’. And then in another five years, around 1995, people tried to communicate on the World Wide Web with a phone hookup to their personal computer and the “Information Age” began. Some people talk about the ‘Personal Computer Age’ but it’s really all about information flow.”

VISITOR: ‘This Blitz is tasting a little old, I think I gotta go. Good luck with your SCI-FI book, old man.”

With that, he was out the door. Leaving FUD wondering if yesterday’s youth would ever make it. He glanced at the TV screen. The monotonous Prudential ad was once again beeping its “SOS” message in the background as the spokesperson rambled on.

FUD: “Well at least they fixed the ad! It was driving me nuts to have the beeping background spelling “SMS” over and over as the screen showed “… - - -…” (Morse code for ‘SOS’). They finally fixed the ad around Thanksgiving. Why wasn’t some boy scout chasing down that story instead of Tiger Woods hitting a tree?

Flip Video

FUD spent a few minutes thinking about how things had changed in the last year. The sweeping change to HDTV had been dulled in many homes by the equally sweeping recession. FUD pondered how he had been suckered into paying almost $600 a year for cable service for his old

December 09


clunker TV and a similar amount for Internet service. But he was “hooked” and there was no going back to rabbit ears and telephone modems. Whereas once he would have scoffed at people paying elaborate fees ($15) for satellite radio or text messaging or iPhone data service, he could now see how people became hooked and he now considered these monthly fees just part of living, like any other utility bill. The fee schedules were providing (ever so slowly) more service but with ever-increasing monthly prices. There being no real competition, the various services they are doling out added features a teaspoon at a time, mostly just so they had plenty of additional teaspoonfuls to meter out at a later date to justify additional charges. He was certain that the Cable costs would go up again in January, since he had a relative in a local print shop that printed up the new mailings.

As he pondered the ailments of Christmas present he dozed off again in his chair.

Christmas Present He was awakened by a beeping sound coming from his computer. “It must be a Skype call,” he thought. “Since I’m up I might as well watch the last episode of that Sci-Fi mini-series on the SYFY channel.” This had become the case in the last year. There was such good-looking content on the major channels’ websites that he often watched the shows at his leisure in high-res with his headphones connected through his USB adapter. The computer screen was easily twice as sharp and colorful as his old clunker and the sound was vastly superior. He imagined himself “part of the HD generation”, except he didn’t have the big screen.

Small HDTV can Double as a Computer Monitor

“I guess this is the way it will go with computers. The 24-inch, and up, HDTV with 1080p replacing the old 17-inch monitor. I don’t think people will merge computers with their big HDTV in the living room nearly as fast as they will replace their monitor with a small HDTV on their computer desk. There’s an element of “personal” that will creep into the future of computers. That’s why those under-sized notebooks and stupid smart phones are selling like hot cakes. I think people would rather go upstairs and watch their own show rather than have to watch what everyone else is watching in the living room. There’s something exclusive (personal) about watching it alone, just like listening to an iPod instead of a $1000 sound system.” (FUD wondered whether in later years he’d be quoting these very words as being prophetic.)

FUD decided that a Wireless-N connection from the computer to the TV might do and made it a point to include that capability into his future HD big screen. There would be increasing need to deliver moving content to his big TV screen in the near future.

He was reminded of his encounter with the Oracle back in September 2002:

FUD: “Yah, every third or fourth tourist in Vegas was carrying a miniature video camera. They would walk through the crowds staring at the 2-inch screen to navigate as they walked. (I hope they were wearing a money belt!) There MAY be a disproportionate number of tourists or high rollers that are adapting this technology over still cameras. Wadda you think?

Oracle: “Sometimes the crystal ball gets a little cloudy….”

FUD: “Well when you look in it do you see still images or moving images?”

Oracle: “Moving, of course! Don’t you know anything about magic?”

FUD: “Hmmmm (thoughtfully, at least thoughtfully for FUD) maybe I should pay a little more attention to digital movies…..

Oracle: “That’ll be another five bucks.”

FUD had noticed a lot of flash video devices lately as he looked over the Christmas ads. It was flash memory that had spurred the profound change. Although phone cameras had crept into the mix over several years, it was devices like the new iPod Nano with video and the various $100-$200 small “pocketable” video recorders like the Flip Video, that were really gathering steam. Imagine something about the size of a few matchbooks

December 09


replacing that clunky camcorder on your next Hawaiian vacation!

5th Generation iPod Nano does video and FM

And finally all that yammering about HD radio would come to fruition with the availability of HD radio in a portable device from Microsoft. Now the latest Zune was likely to be a bust, not because it sounded bad or had bad features, but it was just not cool enough for the Apple crowd. Apple only recently even acknowledged that people listen to radio, with the most recent version of Nano. The important thing to note was that finally the miniature chipset was available for other HD radio devices and we’d probably see a bunch of $50 HD radios about the size of a deck of cards or smaller. It was tough for a “grass roots” initiative to take off without any real money behind it, but FUD predicted it years ago, so we shouldn’t be surprised by this milestone. Note that now you could buy a cheap Sony car radio for $75 with HDFM built in. It was s slowly creeping into the mainstream, even without TV ads.

Some Blu Ray Players well under $100

FUD noticed that there were now several companies selling 7.1 channel audio receivers for the home theater.

In years past FUD might have done just as well ringing a bell in the desert as extolling the virtues of seven discrete channels. But this year virtually all the blu-ray players had full 1080p resolution and could send Dolby TRU HD audio or DTS-HD Master Audio out the HDMI cable. It’s hard to know whether the content (blu-ray discs) would favor one audio format over the other, so he’d get a player that would play both if planning to hook it up to a 5.1 or 7.1 channel system any time soon. The “Holy Grail” of prices, “$150”, had been easily met and exceeded for blu-ray players. These would, most of them, play recorded MP3s and recorded DVDs and purchased DVDs, virtually making his old CD players, etc., obsolete. He already had a whole collection of audio and video devices that worked great except they had been replaced by equipment that met higher standards…. There would be some great buys at Good Will.

7.1 Channel Receivers are becoming more popular.

It occurred to FUD that much of the present was, for him, the future. “I want this crappy recession over with so I can make some of the bright future of electronics and computers the “present” for me, he grumbled.

Well, at least most of the people FUD knew had made it through 2009 unscathed. It was the pits for those that had faltered, but he was glad for all those that made it into 2010. It certainly could have been worse. He pondered a secret phrase for the next meeting; perhaps “Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!” would be a good one.

December 09


We would like to extend a special

thanks to Infinity Internet for providing us with our web service.

PPCUG Contacts

· Executive Board Officers ·

President ................................ Dean La Voie [email protected]

1st Vice President .............. Douglas Howard [email protected]

2nd Vice President ....................... Paul Cook [email protected]

Treasurer .................................... Betty Cook [email protected]

Secretary ............................ Sr. René Foster [email protected]

Communications ......................... Paul Cook [email protected]

· Service Officers ·

APCUG Representative ........... Dean La Voie [email protected] DB Manager ...................... Douglas Howard [email protected]

Membership ..................... Ambrose Bittner [email protected]

Newsletter Editor ....................... Scott Burr [email protected]

Program Coordinator ....... Douglas Howard [email protected]

Publicity............................ Ambrose Bittner [email protected]

Resource Manager .................. Mike Hazlett [email protected]

Webmaster ............................. Dean La Voie [email protected]

· SIG Leaders ·

Audio/Visual SIG .................... Mike Hazlett [email protected]

Computer Aided Investing .. Sr. René Foster [email protected]

Hardware sig ...................... Gralof De Vries [email protected]

Linux SIG .......................... Douglas Howard [email protected]

PDA SIG ............................ Douglas Howard [email protected]

POLUG SIG ......................... Beverly Walker [email protected]

Wildcard SIG .............................. Scott Burr [email protected]

Our Mailing Address is: PPCUG

950 Lloyd Center - PMB 121 Portland, OR 97232-1260

McCoy Academy 3802 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

Portland OR 97212

The McCoy Academy’s computer room is the meeting place for several of our SIGs. It has access to broadband Internet for our computers through the academy’s DSL connection. McCoy Academy is part of the Oregon Outreach program. High school students ranging from 14 to 21 attend classes here. Direct instruction is balanced with independent student work and a low student-to-staff ratio, which offers students more individual assistance. Mainstream Innervisions provides alcohol and other drug awareness and prevention education on-site. Daycare services and parenting classes are provided teen parents at the McCoy Teen Parent/Daycare which is located on site. Special Education services are available. Staff includes: two full time certified teachers, one part-time certified teacher, a part-time special education teacher, a full time school-to-work coordinator, a part-time parent coordinator, a part-time drug and alcohol counselor, a full time social counselor, a volunteer computer refurbishing class teacher/tech contractor, and a contracted performing arts teacher.

Find out more about McCoy Academy at:

www.OregonOutreach.org

Portland Computing Newsletter

Vol. 28 · No. 12 · December 09

Portland Computing is a publication of the Portland PC Users Group (PPCUG) ©1982-2009 Portland PC Users Group. All Rights Reserved. No part of Portland Computing may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the PPCUG. All submissions to Portland Computing become property of PPCUG, which reserves the right to determine suitability for publication. Permission to reprint is generally offered given that the articles are unaltered, unedited and the publication credits the author and the PPCUG. Portland Computing is published monthly as a service to its members. Trademarks used herein belong to their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. Any comments, claims, or opinions expressed herein are made solely by the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of PPCUG or its members.

Our Yearly Dues are $50

Our Membership Year is:

Nov 1 – Oct 31

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