Vol. 24 number 1 January 2007 The newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group Calendar OPCUG General Meeting National Museum of Science and Technology 1867 St. Laurent Blvd. Second (*third) Wednesday of each month, 7:30pm Jan 10 A Little HTML Knowledge by Alan German, OPCUG *Feb 21 Topic: TBA, Evelyn Watts, Corel Corporation Mar 14 Apr 11 May 09 Jun 13 BBQ Beginner SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. IT Pro SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. PIG (or Wing?) SIG, after all the other SIGs, at 10 p.m. Chances "R", 1365 Woodroffe (at Baseline), College Square Beer BOF (Wing SIG East, after all the SIGs, at 10 p.m. Liam Maguire's, St. Laurent at Innes Rd. (formerly Hooters) Please note that unless otherwise noted, SIGs meet at 9:00 p.m. (immediately following the OPCUG General Meeting). ____________________________ Coming Up... January 10th, 2007: Speaker and topic TBA Please check the OPCUG website for updates at http://opcug.ca/ and click on the Meetings button in the left frame. February 21st, 2007 (THIRD Wednesday) Speaker: Evelyn Watts, Product Specialist, Corel Corporation. Topic: TBA June 13th, 2007: Annual BBQ; Speaker TBA ____________________________ January Raffle At the January meeting, thanks to the generosity of Microsoft Canada, we have a copy of Microsoft Student Office 2003 for the raffle. This full-featured suite of applications includes the venerable Word word processor, Excel for crunching numbers, PowerPoint for creating stunning presentations and Outlook, the complete e-mail and calendar application. Visit http://www.microsoft.com/office/editions/prodinfo/students/o verview.mspx Raffle tickets are $1 for one, $2 for three, or $5 for ten. ____________________________ December Raffle Winners The Raffle winner of WordPerfect X3 was Maurice Duchesne. Thanks to Corel Corp.. And again Santa came early in the guise of Harley Bloom. A large number of presents went out to the "good girls and boys" at the December meeting including a digital camera for Mike Doyle, A USB storage key for Wes McDavid, new power bars for Stu Moxley, Vern Foster and Don Chiasson, and a USB "spy" pen for George Monson. As well, a collection of other goodies like daytimers, tickets to 67's hockey games, CD's and pens went out to a variety of folks including, but not limited to, John Gingrich, Herb Gillingham, Frank Rogers, Alan German, John Middleton, Ted May and Bob Gowan. A big thanks to Harley Bloom for all the great stuff and all members are reminded to visit Harley's "workshop" at Bloom MicroTech (5303 Canotek Rd., Unit #3) if they are interested in dropping off computer related equipment for recycling, or buying used parts and various computer accessories of all kinds. ____________________________ News from the Linux (and FOSS) SIG By Don Chiasson The January Linux SIG will focus on Open Office, doing an install and set up for appropriate defaults. This will be followed by demonstrations of OO Writer (Word), Calc (Excel), and Impress (Power Point). You don't need Microsoft office any more! Free CDs of OO version 2.0 will be available. In December, we did a demonstration running a Knoppix live disk and did an install, with dual boot of Ubuntu. Both just ran. During the install demo, I mentioned that Partition Magic seemed to be the best program - a Windows program - for changing partitions. I looked at the web site file for GNU Parted (http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/index.shtml), to my mind the most familiar open source partitioning software, which said it did not handle NTFS. So I looked a bit more and found the Debian Help lists parted for changing disk partitions, but it does not do anything with NTFS. Further looking found GParted (http://gparted.sourceforge.net/) which does handle NTFS. Finally, a frequent question for Linux newbies is "What program is equivalent to my Windows [....]?" There is now a web site to answer that question, the Linux Equivalent Project, http://www.linuxeq.com/. It does not cover everything, but gives a good idea of what is available. I found a similar list on Debian Help, http://www.debianhelp.co.uk/tools.htm. There are lots of options. ____________________________ Product Review Picasa - Image Management by Google by Alan German Picasa is a free image management program available from Google. As might be expected, the package has a number of web-based components. These include the ability to order prints by E-mail from your favourite photo finisher, share photographs with friends and relatives using "Hello" (http://www.hello.com/), and even post images to a free blogging site (http://www.blogger.com/start). But, the software also has many of the desirable features of a stand- alone image manager, albeit with some novel twists in their operation. The download from http://picasa.google.com/download/ is around 4.7 MB. The package is easily installed; however, note that it requires an MMX-capable processor (it refused to run on my old desktop machine!). Picasa thinks its mission in life is to catalogue all the image files on your hard drive into its library. Consequently, running the program for the first time offers the opportunity to either scan the entire computer for available image files, or just look for images in My Documents, My Pictures and the Desktop. Being a perverse being and, since I don't normally store images in the latter directories, I opted for the partial scan that produced just a single folder in Picasa's list, this being My Pictures containing sample.jpg. The Actions button let me remove the folder from Picasa and thus I had a clean slate with which to start. In fact, I now had a very clean slate, with most of the available menu items and action buttons being greyed out! Finding some images to work with was straightforward - File - Add Folder to Picasa - c:\nikon - Scan Once. The alternative to the latter was Scan Always, which has Picasa "watch" the folder for any changes. Although I didn't use the watch mode to start with, this should be the preferred method for a production system. Any changes to the files, e.g. deletions through Windows Explorer, or additions by importing pictures from a digital camera, are instantly shown in Picasa's display. By default, the program includes images in sub-directories below the specific folder chosen. It also recognizes the date order of the photographs and automatically orders the list of sub-folders by year and month. The layout of Picasa's main window provides three main panes - a list of folders (file directories), thumbnail views of the images in these folders, and a Picture Tray where selected images can be temporarily located for various processing operations, including image rotation. A convenient slider bar allows the thumbnail images to be resized, so you can have lots of tiny thumbnail images in view at any given time, or a smaller number of larger - and crystal clear - images. The program has the usual File, Edit, View menu bar with a bunch of additional commands under Folder, Picture, Create and Tools menu options. A large number of the program's parameters can be customized through a set of tabs - General, E-Mail, File Types, Slideshow and Printing - in the Tools-Options menu. The Help menu is restricted to a web- based system and thus requires an available Internet connection; however, most of the program's operations are pretty intuitive, especially if you have used any other image management program. A second level menu provides icons to import images from an external device (e.g. a digital camera), run a slideshow, view images on a timeline, or create a "gift CD" of various images. The slideshow runs a full-screen display of the images in a selected folder. Moving the mouse pops-up an options menu where, for example, you can change the delay between slides. The timeline view is interesting, using the dates of the images in various folders to allow selection of a folder using a slide bar. Specific points marked on the "timeline" correspond to the date of a folder. These are also denoted on the screen by a pile of thumbnail "prints" of the images indicating the folder's contents in a very novel way. Another interesting feature is that as the slider moves from point to point on the timeline, the background screen image switches to a faded, grey-tone vignette of the first image in the corresponding folder. The lower window on the program's main screen is named the Picture Tray. Clicking on any image in the selected folder creates a mini-thumbnail image in this tray. Multiple images can be added by using Shift-Click, or by pressing the Hold button to retain a selected image in the tray whilst others are added. Icons in the tray include quick links to print the selected images, send them by E-mail, or even to go on-line to order prints. Another option in this menu is the ability to create a collage of the images in the tray. This can be a Picture Pile - where the images are scattered seemingly randomly and usually overlapping - an interesting effect but of dubious practical use. More useful is an option to create a contact sheet of the images, or perhaps even a Picture Grid where all the images are tiled to make a composite image. Double-clicking on an image provides some picture editing tools including crop, straighten, fix red eye, colour and contrast controls. With Picasa coming from Google it isn't surprising that one of the tools is "I'm feeling lucky" - providing automatic lighting and contrast modifications. Changes made with any of the editing tools are previewed in the editor window and are easily undone and redone to observe the effect before committing to the change. Changes in any image are retained within Picasa's library environment. The modified version of the image is available even after exiting from the program. Next time the program is run, any changes can still be undone. Saving a changed image permanently requires "exporting" the image from the Picture Tray to a new folder. The "Basic Fixes" in the image editor are complemented by a "Tuning" tab that provides fine control over parameters like fill lighting, highlights, shadows, and color temperature. There is also an "Effects" tab that includes changing colour photographs to sepia or black and white, adding tints of various colours, "sharpening" the image, or adding a soft focus with varying degrees of the size of the central area and the amount of the surrounding "softness". A really strange effect for my money is to add a "film grain", especially since, as with all these effects, this can be added multiple times to make your beautiful digital image incredibly grainy! Picasa has many more features including the ability to add labels and keywords to images. Adding a label to a set of images, e.g. "Bird" to photographs of birds stored in various folders on your hard disk, creates a new (virtual) folder named Bird that contains all the images with the label. I call the folder virtual because, effectively, it contains links to the original images, and not copies of the image files themselves. So, if you delete an image from the label directory, it is still available in its original folder. In a similar manner, one or more keywords can be added to a group of images. Images tagged with the same keyword do not appear in a separate folder; however, Picasa has a search engine that will display images with the target keyword, grouped by their original folders. In fact, both keywords and labels can be the subject of a search to identify various categories of images. If several of the above-noted features sound as though they would be useful to you as image-management tools, then give Picasa a try. Some of its features are similar to other such programs, but some things it does very differently. There is a bit of a learning curve involved to find out exactly what Picasa does, and how it does it, but this is no worse than for other software packages. And, Picasa is freeware so - if it works, it's a bargain, and - if it doesn't work (for you), it's a bargain! Bottom Line Picasa Version 2.2.0 (Freeware) Google, Inc. http://picasa.google.com/ ____________________________ Product Review My Life with a Handheld - Part 3 (2006) - The Rose by Bob Thomas Part 2 - http://opcug.ca/public/Articles/0601.pdf Part 1 - http://opcug.ca/public/Articles/0501.pdf Happy 2007 folks! 2006 has been a busy year for our handhelds. In my case the rose was losing some of its bloom for a spell. Fear not, read on and get tips for keeping the bloom on your handhelds. In terms of hardware, I had upgraded to a VGA resolution Dell Axim, complete with a hard/soft-ware Presentation Package. Over and above the nicely detailed screens of information the VGA screen provides, this baby has both Wi- Fi and Bluetooth communications built-in. So I had connectivity wherever these facilities were available. My second purchase was in the fast-growing Mobile Phone handheld field. It's in this arena that Moore's Law thrived this year. My Audiovox pocket PC phone provides me with world-wide connectivity. Services I purchased for it provide me with North America-wide Voice and Data. These accompany the built-in Bluetooth connectivity and 1.3MB camera. If only this model had the Axim's VGA resolution screen, CPU- speed and memory! I could then forego the Axim, since the Audiovox, unlike the Axim, has a built-in keyboard that you can slide into view when it's needed. Next year, maybe? Generally in the handheld industry we saw some manufacturers add GPS internally. Others increased camera resolution or added auto-switching to/from landscape mode. You could buy more storage 'bang for the buck', with flash memory devices of 4GB going for US $220, the 2GB triple speed (20 MBps) going at US $130 and double speed cards going for $95 Cdn during Fall 2005. However, what makes these babies such a pleasure to use are their applications. This year the upgrades to the winning Users' Choice applications continued. Pocket Informant moved to up to V2007 R2.731; Pocket Genealogist to V3.02, Pocket Streets and Trips to V2006.13.0.09.0100 , Pocket Mechanic to V2.02.129; AvantGo to V6.2 B52; and Adobe Reader to V2.0 B.20040724. All improved their capabilities incrementally. Visionary applications such as Voice Command, now at V1.6, appeared to let you vocally interact with your handheld. Mapping/GPS applications abounded as did VOIP apps such as Skype, Sudoko for numerologists, and E-mobile TV for couch potatoes. The reliability of the Windows Mobile 2005 operating system release saw the major manufacturers make it their OS of choice for the handheld market. Mobile 2005 greatly reduces the entwined link between the hard and soft ware, therein making it easier to install in manufacturers new products. I purchased additional service storage at AvantGo to accommodate my growing volume of RSS, News feeds, Travel itineraries, etc. I added Sling Player so I can watch my home's digital cable TV stations from anywhere in the world while I'm travelling. This is great for watching local or Movie Channels that aren't available everywhere. This year Wi-Fi communications became much easier to use, principally because auto-detection became more prevalent. Sadly, it should be noted that in Canada it is becoming more prevalent to see the airports, hotels, etc. charging for Wi- Fi access, although the City of Toronto provides it free in the downtown core business area. Wi-Fi is much more freely available in the US. I use Voice Command daily. It provides me with hands-free use of the phone for the Audiovox. Either vocally or by vibration, Voice Command reminds me of my appointments in both of my mobiles. Not being a phone person by nature, surprisingly I've found that I'm using the phone a lot. So much so that I had to replace my worn out stereo ear buds w/microphone! Twice I found myself exceeding the monthly 400 minute time allotment I had purchased for vocal calls (Not surprising since I'm now in BC and my friends in Ottawa can reach me by dialling my local 613 area code number). When it comes to planning trips or doing my travels, I use Pocket Streets and Trips 2006 w/GPS applications extensively. While Pocket Streets and Trips doesn't provide the night view that's available in the PC version (see Chris Taylor's article in the October 2005 newsletter, Vol. 23, #8, pp. 1,7, http://opcug.ca/public/Reviews/S&T2006.htm), it employs the Pharos GPS-360 that comes with the 2006 software. You transfer your selection of your customized maps or regular maps from your PC to the Pocket PC. Alternatively you can transfer maps from the Internet for the major cities throughout the world. Photo stories with music produced using the freely available Photo Story 3 from Microsoft (editor's note: see article on p.4) please many an audience member. They're eager to be the next in line to see them on the handheld whenever a larger screen isn't available for a group showing. That's where the Presentation Package comes in handy - for showing those photo albums, Screen shots and PowerPoint Presentations. It's best to have your handheld's power supply running when showing these. By now I can hear you asking, "Why, at the start of this article, did Bob say that the rose was losing some of its bloom?" Herein lies the tale... At summer's start I was on the road to spend a summer of holidaying at the cottage when I experienced a sudden loss of power in each of my handhelds (at separate points in time). No problem, my warranties provided me with replacements delivered to my door (the store in the case of the phone) in a couple of days. In both cases loose contacts with the battery caused the problem - better than having exploding batteries. In the case of the phone, you should be sure that the store clerk properly reactivates all of your services. In my case he missed the Internet activation for my Data service necessitating a return visit to the store. A bit of lustre was gone from the rose. Some more followed when I realized that I needed to completely restore all my applications and Address book. I had most of these with me in my memory card backups. BUT ... Experientially, the lesson I learned is: You must have your CDs, keys/licence #'s, User/Product ID's and passwords with you when you're travelling. Restores from backups don't remember these. You're asked for them when first trying to use your restored application. Some backup apps don't back up your user-installed software apps, only backing up your application data. If these software applications are on CD's, then you'll require a suitably equipped PC to do the restores. So it's a good idea to have these applications available in a flash memory device that your handheld can employ. That's where mine lost some of their bloom. Some of these items were out in BC and I was in Quebec! So for a couple of months I was deprived of using some apps. Dell's Windows Mobile 2005 upgrade for the Axim didn't install correctly, a Dell-wide problem that they resolved by providing a roll-back to 2003 Mobile version. Some more of the bloom's lustre accompanied this. One day as Fall approached I accidentally leaned on the screen of the Axim with my elbow, cracking the screen and disabling all navigational control. A bit more lustre gone. Kudos must go to Dell who once again quickly replaced my warrantied Axim. Another complete restoration of my apps and data was required. But at least this time I was experienced at it! Be sure you know the procedural steps to follow to connect to new sites with your wireless. They vary from one software package to another (Each handheld manufacturer tends to use different software). Never two without three. The Axim's cradle connector to the Axim then failed so I couldn't connect it to my new notebook computer. Dell quickly replaced the cradle. However a bit more lustre was gone. Could it be that my Axim was jealous of the new high-resolution wide-screen notebook? The rose regained its lustre first in October when my apps were fully restored after my return to BC. The lustre grew even brighter in latter November when my first grandchild eagerly clutched her first handheld! A new bloom! Happy Computing, Bob Thomas, OPCUG ____________________________ Product Review Photo Story - So, you want to be a movie director? by Alan German Do you have dozens of digital photographs from your recent vacation, or visit to your grandchildren, and need to package them in a novel way for viewing by friends or family? If so, the tool for you might be Photo Story from Microsoft and - gasp! - it's a free download. But, a word of caution, the program only runs under XP, so users of earlier versions of Windows need not apply. The program is essentially a multi-function wizard that guides you through the various steps necessary to develop a fully-contained movie file with your chosen photographs, added titles, spoken commentary, and even a music soundtrack. At each stage, you can opt to include the feature being offered, or move onto the next stage of the process. As you might imagine, the first step is to identify a number of digital images that are to be the basis of the presentation. This is achieved by using the Import Pictures button to insert a group of images onto a "film strip" or linear story board. The initial order of the images is not important since any individual picture can be selected and moved along the length of the story board using left- and right-arrow keys, or by simply dragging the image to the desired location. Similarly, if you want to add more images, or delete one or more existing images, such changes are readily accomplished. Once you have a suitable set of images, it's time to move on to the next step - where you can add text to your pictures. One obvious thing to do here is to put some text on the first image in the series for use as a title slide. You can select a font of any size, colour and attribute, but control over placement is limited to a few, fixed choices for left- to-right and top-to-bottom alignment. One neat feature that can be added at this stage is a special effect - to completely change the look of the picture - with options such as sepia, coloured pencil, and grey outline. An appropriate choice here certainly makes for an interesting title slide. After adding text to one or more images, the next stage is to optionally add comments as a narrative voice-over, and to choose the type of transition between images as the series is displayed. You can choose the time for which each image is displayed or have the program determine this automatically. There is a wide range of transition effects, such as cross fades and page curls. In addition, there is the added ability to specify starting and ending positions for the transitions by moving and resizing frames on thumbnails of the image. The result, which can be previewed, is a very neat effect with the view either zooming in or out as one image changes to the next. The next choice is to add background music to your movie. Different tracks can be added to different images or groups of images by selecting one picture as an anchor image and assigning a piece of music to start when this image is displayed. The music will then play until either the music track or the slideshow ends, or another anchor image is encountered with a different track assigned to it. Any music tracks in use are noted along the time line of the story board as musical note symbols. Tracks can be associated with a selected image or just dragged onto the time line at any desired spot. The final choice is how to save your newly-created masterpiece. The normal option will be to "Save the story for playback on your computer". The WMV file produced can be viewed in Windows Media Player. There are also options to send the story in an E-mail message, or to set up the story for playback on a Pocket PC, a Smartphone or Mobile Media Player. Each of these options results in the program writing out a WMV movie file; however, the sizes of the various files are different; at least in part resulting from the images being made smaller for display on the smaller screen formats. Photo Story also provides a range of in-story editing functions such as cropping or rotating an image. In addition, there are some rudimentary controls for adjusting colour levels, contrast, and fixing "red-eye" conditions. A tool to remove "black borders" can be applied to automatically crop any images in portrait format since the main display is for images in landscape mode. A preview of such a cropped image allows you to accept the change, to modify the crop selection, or to reject the change in favour of manual cropping using the program's edit capability. It should be noted that any changes remain internal to Photo Story; they do not affect the original images stored on your computer. While this program is dedicated to the task of packaging a series of images for subsequent display as a slideshow, it does this job very well. The program interface is simple to use and yet offers many features. And, because of this combination of ease of use and power, the process of setting up a slideshow, complete with a custom title slide and a music track that fades out at the end of the show, is exceptionally quick. So kudos to the programming team that created Photo Story, and to Microsoft for making their work freely available. It's almost enough to make me want to switch my Windows 2000 machine over to running XP! Bottom Line: Photo Story 3 for Windows XP (Freeware) Microsoft Corporation http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/ photostory/default.mspx ____________________________ The Way Children See Things! provided by Sara Gelfand (continued from last month) ELDERLY While working for an organization that delivers lunches to elderly shut-ins, I used to take my 4- year-old daughter on my afternoon rounds. The various appliances of old age, particularly the canes, walkers and wheelchairs, unfailingly intrigued her. One day I found her staring at a pair of false teeth soaking in a glass. As I braced myself for the inevitable barrage of questions, she merely turned and whispered, "The tooth fairy will never believe this!" DRESS-UP A little girl was watching her parents dress for a party. When she saw her dad donning his tuxedo, she warned, "Daddy, you shouldn't wear that suit." "And why not, darling?" "You know that it always gives you a headache the next morning." DEATH While walking along the sidewalk in front of his church, our minister heard the intoning of a prayer that nearly made his collar wilt. Apparently, his 5-year-old son and his playmates had found a dead robin. Feeling that proper burial should be performed, they had secured a small box and cotton batting, then dug a hole and made ready for the disposal of the deceased. The minister's son was chosen to say the appropriate prayers and with sonorous dignity intoned his version of what he thought his Father always said: "Glory be unto the Faaaather, and unto the Sonnn, and into the hole he gooooes." SCHOOL A little girl had just finished her first week of school. "I'm just wasting my time," she said to her mother. "I can't read, I can't write and they won't let me talk!" BIBLE A little boy opened the big family bible. He was fascinated as he fingered through the old pages. Suddenly, something fell out of the Bible. He picked up the object and looked at it. What he saw was an old leaf that had been pressed in between the pages. "Mama, look what I found", the boy called out. "What have you got there, dear?" With astonishment in the young boy's voice, he answered, "I think it's Adam's underwear!" ____________________________ OTTAWA PC NEWS Ottawa PC News is the newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group (OPCUG), and is published monthly except in July and August. The opinions expressed in this newsletter may not necessarily represent the views of the club or its members. Member participation is encouraged! If you would like to contribute an article to Ottawa PC News, please submit it to the newsletter editor (contact info below). Deadline for submissions is three Saturdays before the General Meeting. Group meetings OPCUG normally meets on the second Wednesday in the month, except in July and August, at the National Museum of Science and Technology, 1867 St. Laurent Blvd, Ottawa. Meetings are 7:30-9:00 p.m. and Special Interest Groups go until 10 p.m. Fees: OPCUG annual membership: $25 per year. Mailing address: 3 Thatcher St., Nepean, Ontario, K2G 1S6 Web address: http://opcug.ca/ Bulletin Board - PUB II (BBS): http://opcug.ca/default.htm President and System Administrator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 613 727-5453 Meeting Coordinator: Bob Gowan, bob.gowan@@opcug.ca Treasurer: Alan German, alan.german@@opcug.ca Secretary: Gail Eagan, gail.Eagan@@opcug.ca Membership Chairman: Mark Cayer, Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca, 613 823-0354 Newsletter: Brigitte Lord, brigitte.lord@@opcug.ca Email: (Mr.)Jocelyn Doire, Jocelyn.Doire@@opcug.ca Public Relations: Morris Turpin, PR@@opcug.ca, 613 729-6955 Facilities: Bob Walker, 613 489-2084 Webmaster: Brigitte Lord, opcug-webmaster@@opcug.ca Privacy Director: Wayne Houston, privacy@@opcug.ca Director without portfolio Ted May, tamay@@rogers.com Beginners' SIG Coordinator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 613 727-5453 IT Pro SIG: Harald Freise Note: We added an extra "@" to the emails to reduce spam. (c) OPCUG 2007. Reprints permission is granted* to non- profit organizations, provided credits is given to the author and The Ottawa PC News. OPCUG request a copy of the newsletter in which reprints appear. *Permission is granted only for articles written by OPCUG members, and not copyrighted by the author. ____________________________ Newsletter by email: To receive the newsletter by e-mail, send a message to listserve@@opcug.ca with the plain text "subscribe NewsletterTXT" or "subscribe NewsletterPDF" (without quotes) in the body of the message. No subject line is required. Cancelling the Paper Newsletter: You can help the environment and save us some costs by sending an email to Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca asking to cancel the delivery of the paper version of the newsletter (or ask him in person - Mark is usually at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings). Announcements Mailing List: To subscribe to the Announcements List send an email to listserve@@opcug.ca, leave the subject blank and in the body of the message put "subscribe announcements" (without the quotes). Within a couple of minutes you will receive a confirmation message from the list server. OPCUG clock/calendar/calculator and mug: Check out the clock/calendar/calculator and thermal coffee mug sporting our club logo at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings! OPCUG insulated mugs are $15 and OPCUG clocks are $20. Reuse, recycle: Bring your old computer books, software, hardware, and paraphernalia you want to GIVE AWAY to the general meetings, and leave them at the table near the auditorium's entrance. Please limit your magazines to publication dates of less than two years old. If you don't bring something, you may want to TAKE AWAY something of interest, so look in on this area. Any item left over at the end of the meeting will be sent to the... recycle bin.