NWA-PCUG Newsletter Article, March 2007
President's Corner
by Bill Moeller, President
wmoeller@arkansasusa.com
(click to email author)


Reflecting on our first two meetings of the year, I can see that one of the big benefits of membership in our club is comparing notes with other members--especially with members like Joe and John who get out there and try new things all the time.

I remember clearly Joe enthusiastically commenting that he had to have the latest in operating systems, brushing aside questions about the risks of using unproven software. I can’t recall his exact words, but they boiled down to “That’s the price you have to pay if you want to be on the cutting edge.”

And this month John brought to the meeting a CD full of all sorts of little goodies that I would never have the guts to download from the internet for fear of doing violence to my precious system. John in his own way is saying the same thing as Joe--if you want to have fun, look around and play around. There’s a lot of fun stuff out there.

Folks like me are the true conservatives of the digital age. We don’t buy into new technology when it first appears, and we don’t replace what we have until we see compelling evidence that it will do more of what we need, and do it at least as reliably as what we have now. We didn’t buy cars with aluminum engines until the bugs were worked out, and we didn’t buy Windows XP until after Service Pack 2 was released. That’s how we operate.

But, let’s face it, folks like us need folks like Joe and John. They are the ones who help work the bugs out of the new stuff; they are the ones who try out the new stuff and tell us what works and doesn’t work; and they are the ones who keep us one step removed from the viruses, system crashes, etc., lurking out there in the great unknown.

Thank you, Joe and John and all you other adventurous spirits out there. You really help to keep this club going.

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