jeff-

many thanks for the notes from the meeting.  it's very helpful for
those of us that weren't able to attend. it sounds like considerable
progress is being made.  

some misc. comment inline.

when last we saw our hero (Wednesday, Nov 12, 2003), 
 Jeff Lehman was madly tapping out:
> Here are the meeting notes from the October TCWUG meeting. Apologies
> for being extremely late. The September meeting notes will follow
> soon.
> 
> 
> October 14th 2003
> 
> 
> Introductions
> 
> 
> The Loring Park project update.
> 
> Ben Nelson and Neal Krasnoff worked very hard getting the equipment
> inventoried and assembling mounts for the antennas. Ben showed off
> pictures of the sturdy antenna mount and we now have a list of
> available equipment for the project. Much of it has been bought by
> Neal Krasnoff, so many thanks to him.  For the backbone between the
> Internet connection and the MCTC site we are planning on using a
> dish antenna and then at the MCTC site using a couple 8.5dBi panels
> to cover the park.  Neal has one panel for now and additional panel
> antennas can be easily purchased and added on as needed for better
> park coverage. Ben Nelson is going to follow up with the MCTC
> maintainance people to get us access to the roof and power and such
> for the equipment. We also need to look at the grounding issues for
> the antennas and equipment.
>                 

if there's a need for additional sector (panel) antenna's are there
any spec's for those of us that might be keeping our eye's peeled for
good deals on h/w?  

> Ben Kochie talked about his project with the University of
> Minnesota. He is working on getting wireless access at a building in
> the St Paul campus. This could eventually be used for a backbone.
> 
> Andrew Zimmer invested much time and effort into a spiffy
> newsletter.  The newsletter talks about basic wireless topics such
> as WEP and some of the latest wireless events. Andrew has also
> developed some pamplets that could be distributed at coffee shops or
> doorsteps of people who have unsecured wireless access points. These
> pamplets also talk about how to set up an access point and why it is
> important to secure them.

i saw  the previous iterations of these at the last meeting and they
were pretty spiffy.  is there a pdf available online for us to take a
peek at?  might not hurt to see if there are any print shops that
would be willing to donate printing resources or tag the printing
along with some other jobs that they're running.  

re: distribution, that's a bit of a thornier problem. but i would
think that some of the businesses proximal to the park which have city
pages stands and such might be willing to donate a little real estate
to the cause.  especially if it helps them sell more latte's etc.

> If anyone would like to contribute any articles such as a howto page
> or if anyone has any distribution ideas we would like to hear them.
> 
> We talked about the tcwug website and the need for it to be updated.
> The individuals who are in charge of the site have not been
> attending for some time and we are looking for someone to add a
> flexible content management system to the site to make it more
> dynamic.
> 
> 
> The TCWUG has been in the news lately. KSTP did a short story that
> supposedly aired about the loring park project. It was in the form
> of a survey of park-goers asking if they would like or use wireless.
> 
> 
> There was also an article in Skypoint News about wireless access in
> the Minneapolis Park Systems.
> 
> 
> An additional way to get the word out about the TCWUG is through
> business cards. We have been talking about getting personalized and
> non-personalized cards to hand out to the public to spread the word.
> Vistaprint was mentioned as an online producer of business cards and
> they have designs and a limited number of free business cards
> online.
> 

{ snipped - misc .signatures }

-- 
steve ulrich                       sulrich at botwerks.org
PGP: 8D0B 0EE9 E700 A6CF ABA7  AE5F 4FD4 07C9 133B FAFC

_______________________________________________
Twin Cities Wireless Users Group Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
http://www.tcwug.org
tcwug-list at tcwug.org
https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tcwug-list