Re: [PLUG] [plug-announce] PLUG West Winter meetings CANCELLED

[Fred Stluka <fred@bristle.com>]

PLUG West members,

On 11/18/12 12:27 AM, Paul L. Snyder wrote:

Due the unavailability of our regular meeting location at FIS in November
and usual low attendance at winter West meetings, PLUG West meetings are
cancelled for November, December, January, and February.  There will NOT
be a meeting on Monday, November 19.

One way to boost attendance might be to have some talks that
are more introductory.

Rich Freeman made that suggestion a while back (see his post
appended below Paul's).  I think it would be a great way to reach
out to potential new members.  Currently, I think new people
attending their first meeting may be intimidated by the expert
level of most of the attendees, and the deep detailed issues we
discuss.  I see a lot of people come for one meeting and never
return.

Rich offered a couple of topics that he could speak on, but no one
ever replied.  He also offered a couple of very specific suggestions
to boost attendance, like "bring a friend" to an intro talk.

If Rich is not available, I could do an intro talk.  I have notes at my
Web site.  I'd start with:
    http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#help
and (not at the Web site) I have a whole outline of intro topics that
I often use when training clients who've never used Linux before.

Or I could do an intro talk on Unix security starting with:
    http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#unix_security
which might tempt JP or someone to follow up with a more
advanced security talk.

Or an advanced talk on all the various forms of I/O redirection:
    http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#general_command_line_redirection

Or an advanced lightning talk on rsync:
    http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#rsync
and a lightweight historical overview of other networking commands:
    http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#unix_networking

Or a relatively advanced talk on aliases:
    http://bristle.com/Tips/Unix.htm#csh_and_tcsh_aliases
and maybe toss in some of my favorite shell scripts.   

Also, we could repeat some of the past talks.  For example, I could
give my "Intro to Cloud Computing" talk again:
    http://bristle.com/Talks/CloudComputing/current/
   

Thoughts?

--Fred

---

Fred Stluka -- mailto:fred@bristle.com -- http://bristle.com/~fred/
Bristle Software, Inc -- http://bristle.com -- Glad to be of service!
Open Source: Without walls and fences, we need no Windows or Gates.

---

On 11/18/12 12:27 AM, Paul L. Snyder wrote:

Due the unavailability of our regular meeting location at FIS in November
and usual low attendance at winter West meetings, PLUG West meetings are
cancelled for November, December, January, and February.  There will NOT
be a meeting on Monday, November 19.

If you're in need of a December event, the PLUG Central and PLUG North
meetings are still on, and the Philadelphia Pinball Geeknic is coming up
on December 15th. 

  http://geeknic.org/?p=181

So, this gives us a few months to get next year's meetings planned out.
I'd love to get some speaker volunteers on the books now for next year, to
avoid the last-minute scrambles we've been having lately.  If you can't
commit to a date this early, that's fine...just send your topic idea to me
or to the discussion list.

Don't know what to speak about?  Pick something you'd like to learn
about...you'll have some motivation to learn about it in the next four
months if you've got a presentation scheduled at the end!
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On 9/5/12 10:41 PM, Rich Freeman wrote:

Looking at the calendar it seems like we have a lot of gaps, at least
at North.  I was wondering if it wouldn't be a bad idea to shift gears
and toss in the occasional newbie-oriented talk?  Maybe aim at
newbie-to-intermediate.  I wouldn't mind doing a talk or two - we
should space them out with the usual advanced talks, and there is no
reason they couldn't be repeated from time to time.

Some topics I could probably quickly prepare - if others also want to
cover these no objections:

1.  Disk Storage (basics of files/permissions/filesystems, then moving
into partitioning, mdadm, lvm).
2.  X11 (servers, clients, display managers, sessions, window
managers, xauth, ssh forwarding, etc).
3.  Getting around in the shell (common commands, redirection, very
basic scripting, alternative shells, xterms, screen,
nano/vi/wget/links, etc).

Some other topics that others might want to cover:
1.  A survey of distros (the big ones, families, etc).
2.  Basic sys admin principles (for multi-user systems, servers, etc).
3.  Software development on Linux.
4.  A survey of common apps.

It seems like I see new faces fairly often, but the material is almost
always over their head unless they came for the topic.  If I gave a
talk for newbies I could probably toss a bone or two to the veterans
but to get the most out of it we'd probably want to try to get
everybody to bring a friend who is new to Linux / etc.

On the bring a friend note, we could even have talks just to introduce
Linux in general to those who have never used it.  I'm not sure
whether we'd actually draw enough of a crowd to make that worthwhile.
That sort of thing wouldn't offer much to even a relative newbie.

Rich

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