The Midnight Writer - February 1996

by Mike Lloret

First of all, I’d like to direct your attention to the meeting schedule, below, for the next couple of months. Please note the changes. The Women’s Club mentioned below caused us to have to change the date of our meeting in November - also on very short notice - and some people didn’t get the notification of change until too late. I hope nobody shows up on the wrong date.

Although I have what is supposed to be the schedule for all of 1996, I’m unwilling to print a schedule which seems all too prone to being changed at short notice.

Frankly, I’m personally very disappointed in what I see as a trend toward giving the TPC a low priority and insufficient consideration. As a long-term "customer", I don’t think it unreasonable for us to get better treatment than we have been getting lately.

Accordingly, I’d like to solicit information from the members regarding potential replacement sites for future TPC meetings. We have a low budget for rent (one benefit of the church is that they charge less than ¥20,000 per evening), and would want a place where we could expect to have meetings on the first Thursday of every month except on holidays such as Golden Week and New Year’s. Convenient location is obviously a consideration, as is the time-frame and facilities available. If you know of a place, please post the information to me in a message on the BBS, or call or fax me. We’re looking into a couple of other options, but the more information, the better.

On a more cheerful topic, I have still managed to resist the temptation to install Win95. My consulting engineer has been suggesting it to me (even though she doesn’t like it, since it’s disabled some of her system’s functions; she’s back to using WFWG 3.11, with Win95 used for experimentation only), and I’ve been wavering a bit, but the need to have a properly functioning system to put out this issue of the newsletter has postponed my experimenting for a while. Since I installed RAM Doubler, I’ve been having very few lock-ups or crashes, so I’m uncharacteristically opting for stability for awhile. I usually like to test out the unknown a bit, push the envelope, rattle the bars... but, then, stability with Windows 3.11 is pretty unusual so I can live with that for a little longer.

Finally, I’d like to ask all of you with the ability to log onto the BBS to open the Program Ideas, AJ Ideas, and Earthquake! conferences, if you haven’t already. The TPC could use your ideas and opinions (not to mention your submissions to the newsletter...) in the first two, and you could be of help to yourself and others by participating in the third, which is dedicated to planning and discussion for preparation, self-protection, and mutual aid in the event of a major earthquake striking the Kanto area. It’s certainly only a matter of time, and there are several people in the conference with useful information, sources for survival goods, and the like. We would greatly value your input, and it might lead to saving your life, or those of people close to you.

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