First meeting thoughts

[Ricky]

I hope to post back with my feedback from the first meeting (and I
hope everyone else does the same) such that we can discuss and
hopefully continue to shape future meetings.

First, though, I would like to thank the folks at ThreeWide for
donating their time, resources, and expertise for the first meeting.
The space was more than sufficient, the presentation was technically
deep, and the refreshments were beyond anything I expected.

We're a very lucky community to have such an ambitious company willing
to donate so many resources to a LUG. It's our responsibility to keep
the community engaged, such that ThreeWide's investment is worthwhile.
I would encourage everyone to spread the word to anyone they can about
MorLUG and get others involved.

Thanks again to the ThreeWide guys and everyone that showed up. We
certainly have a community interest, so lets do our best to spread the
word and keep things interesting.

[John]

I agree with everything Ricky has said above. Many thanks to
everyone
at ThreeWide. Everything really great, and the accommodations for a
LUG meeting were beyond what I imagined. Thank you all for
everything.

[JP Fielding]

glad to hear you guys enjoyed our first take at it.  

a couple of things i learned, mostly in order....

-have a sign out front
-announce what type of refreshments your're providing
-dont type and speak, pick a friend to do one or the other (you'll have practiced teaching one person that way),  for the first time in my life, someone said they couldnt hear me from within eyeshot.  
-and write the instructions/script in advance
-always bring a toy ;-)

apologies on this second to last point, i was on vacation the two weeks immediately prior to yesterday.   hope everyone likes the new toy though.

i know it was a little busy last night (cool, huh?) and we didnt get to all meet.   we'll just have to keep having these until we all do.  

the food will be similar and location will usually be the same unless otherwise noted.   we'll work on being creative with toys/speakers (suggestions welcome) as they pertain to demos.   

last but not least, your invisible hostesses (erin cestelli and victoria simpson ) were key in getting everything setup.  btw, erin is helping spreading the word, so any suggestions on that front i can forward to her. 

[Thomas I Higgins]

Thanks to all, especially the unsung heroes of the event (well, until now I guess ;)).  I want to thank everyone for the assistance in ensuring I was able to get there and say I enjoyed it.  I did find it enlightening and gives me some new things I want to look into now.  

For example -
1)  One stupid question that keeps coming to my mind is why can't we just install the full distribution to the USB stick (instead of installing the LiveCD version).  I am certain that there is a good reason, I just never found it.  We get the machine to boot to the stick, recognize and boot an OS off the stick, mount partitions and trick it into writing to a different partition so that it keeps all settings like a local machine.  Why can't we just install to a USB and use it that way?  Granted it is slow, but it is the ultimate in portability if you know a machine will be available.
2)  JP talked about security (particularly on your Casper partition).  I have lost more than my fair share of these devices (usually through failed lanyards or leaving it in a public PC - surprisingly about equal occurrences believe it or not).  One thing I have learned to do is use TrueCrypt partitions effectively.  Trying this out with the device is something I will definitely want to try.

As a side note -
I have not yet found an effective way to use TrueCrypt partitions cross-platform (I think it is an issue with the encryption keys being transferred), but on a single platform I have a fairly solid usage model that gives me direct access to my files while preventing others from doing the same.  Risking the backlash I will no doubt encounter, I have found my most stable version of this on Windows.  There are many reasons for this, but it centers on experience and need.  As I have pointed out to several of you, my job necessitates me to know the ins and outs of Windows - it is my bread and butter so to speak.  In addition, I needed a secured device to use at work, so my need forced me to make this version work first.  I have only recently started working on a solution for LINUX, but I can't imagine it being much different once I get the key issue resolved.

3)  As a correlation to part 2, if we have a partition that is actually a truecrypt container, would this be readable via truecrypt independent of the OS accessing it?  In other words, does the truecrypt encryption mechanism also resolve the data format in such a way that truecrypt will return it in a readable format (assuming the file type has an association on the system).  If this is the case, it *could* render the Windows partition obsolete as a dump area for windows based files.

If anyone also wishes to look into these questions, please speak up when you get an answer.  My time is not exactly free most of the time, so it may not be very soon that I can answer any/all of these questions.  I will, however, pass on anything I find out.

Thomas Higgins
U. S. Steel, Network Operations Center
1509 Muriel Street
Pittsburgh, PA,  15203
Commercial: 412-433-1582
Steelcom: 8-723-1582

"JP Fielding" <jp.fi...@gmail.com> Sent by: mor...@googlegroups.com 07/01/2008 08:32 AM Please respond to mor...@googlegroups.com

To mor...@googlegroups.com cc "Erin Cestelli" <erin.c...@threewide.com>, "Victoria Simpson" <victoria...@threewide.com> Subject Re: First meeting thoughts

[Ricky]

Did not expect that to take so long. Been a hectic week at work...

I really enjoyed the meeting, and once again want to express how much
I appreciate all the effort involved.

On to the constructive criticism...

- I agree with JP that having a speaker + talker combination is a good
idea
- The presentation may have been a bit too "granular." I'm not sure
what the tech-level of the audience was, but as a first meeting I felt
the material moved a bit slowly
- How about multiple topics per meeting, or one main topic plus some
"quick tips" (I know you gurus have at least a handful of keyboard
shortcuts and other bits of information that you can't live without)

Again, I want to re-iterate that I enjoyed the meeting, I just wanted
to provide my feedback in a (hopefully) constructive manner.

On Jun 30, 11:49 pm, Ricky <ricky.hussm...@gmail.com> wrote:

[JP Fielding]

i like the suggestions.