President's Message

It may seem crazy, but sometimes the best way to sell yourself is not to even try to sell yourself. That seems to be the philosophy of John Patrick, IBM’s Vice President of Internet Technology. For the past several years, John has made an annual pilgrimage to DACS to tell us how it is, not how he or his company thinks it ought to be, and judging by the record attendance at his presentations, that’s just fine with us.

The medium is the message

Back in the Sixties, media guru Marshall McLuhan coined the term "the medium is the message" to show how succeeding generations come to be dominated by the ways information and ideas are transmitted. In contrast to the "hot" medium of sound, which comes fully packaged and requires little of its listeners, McLuhan saw television as a low definition or "cool" medium, with which viewers had to interact in order to complete and customize the image they were seeing on the screen. The "global village" he saw forming out of that imperfect image on the tube bore little resemblance to the global megalopolis that has emerged from the Internet. McLuhan died just as the PC revolution was in childbirth, so the precise meaning of the revolution it spawned is left up to the new media gurus, like John Patrick.

If you want to interact with John’s cool insights on Internet technology, visit his Web page at http://www.ibm.com/patrick/.

DACS on the Web

While surfing through John Patrick’s page, you might want to visit DACS’ own Web site, www.dacs.org. Jeff Setaro, Marlène Gaberel, and the DACS newsletter committee have worked hard to give us a professional Internet presence. You can find the latest announcements and dacs.doc articles before they arrive in your mailbox, view our monthly calendar and all the member services we offer, and surf the many cool links to other sites. Each issue of dacs.doc is archived on the site in Acrobat format shortly after it goes to press, so if you’re missing an issue you can download it.

Want to know how we do it? Come to Jeff’s next Web Site Design SIG on the second Wednesday of the month at the DACS Resource Center.

DACS Board Elections

The annual nomination and election of DACS directors is coming up at the December meeting, with about one-half of the board up for reelection. Candidates so far include incumbents Charles Bovaird, Wally David, Dick Gingras and Ed Heere, plus Marlène Gaberel and Gene Minasi. Additional candidates can be nominated from the floor at the meeting. The current roster of candidates is
barely enough to fill the available seats on the board. Is that because we have done such a great job that no one feels they could improve on it? Or, perhaps one naturally concludes that if the president is constantly asking for volunteers, then there must be a catch somewhere. The answer
lies somewhere in between. We have been blessed with an activist board who have worked very hard to serve our members and make DACS a success. But at some time we all need a break. That’s why it’s so important that new people come in to invigorate our ranks and to nudge us in new directions. The rest of us would like nothing better than to sit back and let someone else take the reins. Although having more candidates than seats means someone won’t get in, those who show an active interest always get invited to meetings and quickly join the inner circle.

So, when you come to the December meeting, raise your hand and say "I would like to add my name to the list of candidates," I’ll be the first to say "I second the nomination."

Y2K - The Sequel

If you missed the special Y2K conference last month, don’t worry. It won’t go away that easily. A second conference is being planned for next spring to explore what has been done or still needs to be done to head off this unnatural, if not totally unmitigated, disaster. Ed Heere has promised to return as moderator with another panel of professionals, and will provide a series of short presentations on Y2K at our monthly meetings. We are working on a special Y2K issue of dacs.doc, and expect to put a transcript of the November proceedings on the Internet.

--Allan Ostergren
dacsprez@aol.com