These are indeed the Official Minutes of the Meeting of the Board of Directors of the Open Computing Facility. Accept no substitute.

The semester got off to a roaring start with the usual suspects. Those present included:

    appel - our fearless GM
    blojo - rambunctious young upstart
    cgd - rgm wanna be
    dpassage - just who is this guy?
    gwh - famous usenet personality
    ianb -
    mehlhaff - dweller in the underground
    rgm - our fearless SM
    rsr - roy by any other name
    welch - your's truly
    yukai - ever present, and I look up his name every time

The first order of business was the ritual of the fish. If you weren't there, mere text cannot express to you what a moving experience it was for all involved. You can, however, simulate this experience by going to the candy shop in the ASUC and asking the salesgirl named Darlene for a pound of sour fish. Give her the money, and tell her Sean sent you. Having acquired a bag of small, semi-transparent tidbits, place them all in your mouth and try to imagine upgrading to X11R5 Alpha will will come out in the middle of February. Only by doing this can you attempt to reach the higher plane on which the meeting was conducted.

After the ritual of the fish, the ritual of Margaret was conducted.

We reviewed the printer problem briefly, and for those of you who missed it the Nth time around, here's where we currently stand. We should be able to implement the software we have now without too much trouble (yeah, sure) by simply reconfiguring it. We still have no toner, and so that became an issue later in the meeting. Keep reading for details.

Appel discussed with us the results of our letter to that Tien dude, the one in the big house. It was termed as being rather ambiguous, perhaps saying "No", but in a very polite way. We still all have the greatest enthusiasm for the success of the mission. Having received the letter, he met with bh. The meeting was termed "boring and unproductive."

At this point in the meeting, blojo quipped:

    One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

He quickly followed up with

    Send a fish to hardyck.

We quickly moved onto the issue of toner cartridges, and printing in general, after we recovered from Jon's poetic wit. There was little debate as we pushed the issue back onto the old issue stack and hoped it wouldn't resurface. As a possible way of burying it, someone said that printing was merely an aside since we didn't have a decent word processor and that we should talk about that. We did, for a little while, and eventually decided that we would most likely never have one and not to worry about it for now.

Back to printing. We decided that we should get some toner regardless of what else happened. After some debate, we voted to use our manna as it would evaporate if we didn't.

Having participated somewhat in the debate, Adam Glass was overcome by how well the Board was dealing with adversity, said something about how it was better than it had ever been back in the old days, and begged to be readmitted to the Board. (Or at least that's how I remember it.) With a vote of 11 yes, 1 abstention, and 1 no vote for Partha (just like the old days I'd say), it was made so.

We talked briefly about the ex-user (not X user) dburr, and it was stated that we were going to let him back into the cluster. His account had been turned off as per his request last semester after some questionable activities of his concerning the running of a MUD. Rgm was quoted as saying "the user is always right."

Next week we will be discussing the Constitution - something to think about, from the BoD.

In a shameless plug for the CSUA, Blojo mentioned the CSUA General meeting, on the 29th. Contact you local CSUA member for the full scoop, or read one of the many beautiful flyers you might find in Evans and Cory Halls. Also look for the UNIX (TM) help sessions, you newbies.

Elections - they are to be in the third week of school. dpassage was voted to be the MC (not to be confused with touch@soda).

Productive meetings? We would like to get back to them. Do your part.

Back to that printing stuff. We decided that the issue of printing was more than just a matter of getting toner. We reopened the discussion of free printing. We had previously decided that we would allow each user a quota, based on how much money we would have, with which they could print for free, and then pay for each sheet after they had filled their quota. We decided that given the unstable nature of the universe, it would be foolish to assume anything about the users' printing habits. Better, we more recently decided, to let them print for as long as we had the toner. Hopefully we will be able to continue to get funding from the EJC, and perhaps even increase our budget next year, but until then, we will make do with what we have.

Sean Welch "What are you going to do with your life? Nothin." - The Replacements