President's Message

Are you suffering from mouseopause? Did you ever want to trade that extra RAM for a RamJet, or move up to a turbo joy stick? Come to the March DACS meeting, where you’ll experience the latest in flight simulation games for the Mac and PC. Actually, “games” doesn’t go far enough. These are hi-tech tools that even the pros use to keep in training. Just be sure to change your coordinates to Main and South Street in Danbury, go about 100 yards further south, then right, and taxi up to the gate at Rogers Park Middle School Auditorium.

The Poet Robert Burns certainly didn’t have DACS in mind when he wrote of the hapless field mouse who lost his house, but then the situation seems to fit. Five days before our February meeting, I learned that a scheduling error had pitted us against a competing event at the hospital, and we would have to find another location. We chose Danbury High School and quickly launched Plan B, which is to notify members by e-mail and postcard of the new location and send out new releases to the press and other public groups. Plan B went as planned…until the snow closed Danbury Schools. There was no Plan C, except to notify area radio stations of the cancellation of a meeting and hope that members got the message.

A similar conflict next month requires us to move our March 6 meeting to Rogers Park Junior High School. We have reaffirmed our scheduling for the rest of the year with the hospital. The program on assistive technology will be rescheduled, perhaps as a mid-month special meeting. Murphy’s Law has a corollary about the predictible unpredictability of Mother Nature which may not be entirely appropriate for a family publication; so I’ll turn again to Burns, the Scottish Poet who waxed so eloquently on uncertain expectations:

Find a busy man

It’s an editor’s worst nightmare: deadline night and no copy. So I got out the list of old reliables and started dialing.

Only four days earlier, Mike Kaltschnee had become the proud father of an 8-pound 5-ounce baby girl, and was busy pushing the bottle. "I think I can handle that. I’ll get you a couple of pieces by tomorrow."

Bruce Preston was en route somewhere for the long President’s Day weekend, and responded to my urgent e-mail asking for an article to replace his Random Access column. "I’ll get you something later in the week," he wrote back. It was in my in-box the next day.

Jack Corcoran (Virtual Jack), was up to his ears in family matters, and hadn’t even been able to turn on his PC in ten days. "I’ll have something for you tomorrow evening." And he did!

There’s an old saying that when an important job needs to be done, find a busy man. Of course, nowadays one expects as much productivity from a busy woman as well, but the concept is still valid. For a guide to overcoming writer’s block and a general pep talk, see Mike Kaltschnee’s piece on page 5.

As for me, I’m still struggling to get my column out three days after the deadline.

--Allan Ostergren
dacsprez@aol.com