This month well just relax and have a picnic. This meeting is open to members and their families and significant others. Members can also bring friends. We’ll light the grill at 5:30.

The place is Charnel Mulligan Park at 17th & Charnelton. That’s 2 blocks west of the Veterans’ Building where we normally meet. It’s a beautiful urban park with shaded eating space and lots of space for the kids to play. There’s a small market (Cornucopia) down the street if you forget anything and Safeway is 3 blocks away if you REALLY forget something.

EMUG will provide hamburgers, hot dogs, veggie burgers, buns, condiments, soda and paper plates. Bring side dishes, chips or salad. Bring your own cutlery (We’ll have some spares available).

Bring a friend and bring a smile!

This month we’re switching away from our planned topic – resurrecting those photos you thought were too bad for display. We’ll come back to that in the near future. The iPhone is the focus everywhere else so why not here?

Yup. We were going to play it safe and let the hype pass. We would then take a measured, cautious look at the iPhone in a couple of months. We would wait to see if, and how it changed the industry and the world. EMUG – the soul of caution and responsible action.

We ran out of saliva.

We have a representative of AT&T coming to show off the iPhone and talk about the device and the services it provides. We’ll have iPhones for you to touch (fondle, fawn over, ogle, caress, [insert your pet hyperbole here]) and experiment with. We plan to have a good time messing about with the iPhone!

Even mister, “I’m just not a phone person.”, Dick Lennox, our Apple Ambassador, has fallen to the siren song of the iPhone. Words can not express my surprise!

The Macintosh Mystery Hour precedes the main meeting. See the sidebar for details. As always… Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

This month we’ll take a look at Aperture. This is Apple’s all-in-one post-production tool for managing and adjusting professional photos. Derek Dickerson has an Apple training video that we’ll use to get the juices flowing. You’ll probably pick up some knowledge that will help you even if you “only” use iPhoto! Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

Podcasting is one of the fastest growing forms of multimedia today. We’ll discuss the medium, the media and the tools of podcasting. We’ll show some examples and then we’ll assemble one from scratch at the meeting on Wednesday, May 16th. Along the way we’ll use GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie, and anything else in the iLife and iWork suites that suits our fancy. Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

This month we’ll explore Beryl, a piece of open source software similar in effect to the Core Animation and Spaces components of the upcoming Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) release. It’s written in C using OpenGL and we’ll be viewing it mounted on a PC.

Derek Dickerson will show us what it’s all about. Derek is new to the group and has listed numerous open source applications and utilities on the EMUG Forum. Check out the links he listed in the post “Open Source Software Links” in the Forum.

As we did last month, we’ll tinker with Automator again if time allows. Bring your scripts and actions to show the group.

As always, bring your questions, bring your answers, and bring a friend.

We thank Don Macnaughton for his introduction and overview of the sights and sounds of Web 2.0. He used his LCC home page as a start point and reference and has allowed us to publish that address for our members' use. Here's the link. Don used a YouTube video entitled The Machine is Us/ing Us to illustrate the vision of Web 2.0.

We also used several sites to illustrate our Automator meeting segment. Apple's site is the first place to look. Then check out Automator World, Automated Workflows, MacScripter, and Doug's Applescripts for iTunes .

We’ll have a split bill for March.

Beyond MySpace

Social networks like MySpace & YouTube are sweeping the digital world; but there are dozens of other lesser-known free services that carving their own niches. Don Macnaughtan from LCC Library will introduce a few, including:
Delicious (organize your bookmarks) http://del.icio.us/
Flickr (organize your photos) http://www.flickr.com/
Last.fm (organize your music) http://www.last.fm/
LibraryThing (organize your own library) http://www.librarything.com/
Platial (map anything) http://platial.com/

Automator: a Primer

None of us in the leadership group have any great skills in building Actions or Workflows for Apple’s Automator yet. This will be a collaborative effort. You can help by bringing you own Automator creations. Email Kerry using the Contact link at the top of this so we know what to expect. The exhilarating part is that we never know when a member will have that special knowledge that opens our eyes to something completely new!

Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

We’ll explore several alternatives to Microsoft Office. We’ll look at Open Office, Neo Office, Mariner Calc, among others. If you have experience with any of these programs, bring your expertise. If you have example files, send them to me so I can have them mounted and ready to go.

We are pleased to be able to raffle a copy of Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, Second Edition. See the previous article for details.

We’ll also discuss recent announcements from Apple. Bring your questions. Bring your answers. Bring a friend!

Is your data safe? What if your hard disk fails? Or a burglar ransacks your office? A backup is essential, but not all backups are created equal. You need a rock-solid backup strategy that ensures you can restore quickly and completely, no matter what catastrophe arises.

The second edition of the best-selling Take Control of Mac OS X Backups, provides the straightforward advice you need to go beyond the false security of copying a few files to CD. You’ll find an at-a-glance comparison of different backup strategies (low-cost, easy, safest) for backing up and restoring data, including digital photos and video projects.

You’ll learn the pros and cons of each type of backup media, including hard disk, recordable disc, tape, and more; discover how to pick the best backup software for your needs; and find time-tested recommendations for setting up, testing, and maintaining backups, complete with instructions on how to restore after a crash. Important lessons you’ll learn along the way include the utility of having both a duplicate and an archive, the necessity of testing backups, and the role of offsite backups. Includes over 20 pages of step-by-step directions for Retrospect!

New coverage in the second edition includes:

• How the forthcoming Time Machine feature in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard might work in your backup strategy.
• Backup-related advice for people who are running Windows on a Mac.
• Recommendations for how to back up while traveling.
• Significantly expanded information about SAN and NAS.
• Info about offloading seldom-used data to recover drive space.
• Advice on setting up an easy-to-use backup system for a relative or friend.
• Discussion of issues associated with creating command-line backup systems.
• Using Amazon S3 for inexpensive Internet backups.

“This was just about the best $10 I ever spent… Joe’s ebook gave me
just what I needed.” -Robert Bowman

“An inexpensive, attractive, and exhaustive resource, kept up-to-date
by virtue of its electronic format and made accessible to everyone.
And everyone should buy it and act on it, unless their data is
entirely dispensable. Highly recommended.” -Think Secret

Includes coupons worth $30 off Data Backup, $25 off BackJack, and $5
off backup hardware or software at Small Dog Electronics!

And save 10% off the book’s price right now with the MUG discount
embedded in the link below.

<http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html?14@@!pt=TRK-0014-TCMUG&cp=CPN31208MUG>

We’ll have a copy to raffle at the meeting.