Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 02/13/2006 The meeting was called to order at 7:30 PM by jbarnold. In attendance were Voting members: tabbott jbarnold jhawk mshaw kchen presbrey janetryu | golem glasser | yoz Associate members: asedeno rjbarbal Prospectives: rradez cporter tilia cfdoming | jwalden Guests: Treasurer's Report: tilia: He's downstairs. Chairman's Report: jbarnold: We have these elections today. We'll put them off, hoping for more people to show up. jbarnold: We're going to go in order as seen below. jbarnold: For each office, we do nominations, and the nominees must be seconded and accept to be a candidate. jbarnold: After the officers we'll do the 5 EC positions. By default, all members are nominated; you have to explicitly decline if you don't want to be nominated. [jbarnold reads the purpose of the officers from the constitution] jbarnold: Open nominations for chair. kchen: I nominate tabbott. golem: Second. tabbott: Can I delay on this? janetryu: I nominate jbarnold. golem: Second. jbarnold: I accept. [pause waiting for further nominations] tabbott: I accept my nomination. jbarnold: Okay, so we'll do speeches and stuff and then get kicked out. [secy swap from tabbott to jhawk] jbarnold: I decided that I have 3 humble campaign promises. 1st I wouldn't be running if I didn't plan on taking it as seriously as I did last year. 2: if elected, I pledge to secretly learn Robert's Rules, to ambush jhawk when least expected and apply parliamentary smackdown. 3: pledge to refrain from telling the SIPB to suck it more than once per term. tabbott: Darn, I forgot to move the censure the chair for telling SIPB to suck it at the last meeting. ctl: Prefer to vote for you if you told SIPB to suck it more often. tabbott: I'm going to interpret the rule that we're not supposed to campaign that I'm not going to make campaign promises. jbarnold: BEFORE THE ELECTION is the rule. tabbott: I'm probably more likely to be hosed than jbarnold, and not sure I'll put as much time into things like the ISTAB meeting that he's put a lot of time into. mshaw: Can you name 4 incidental motions? jbarnold: in-ci-dent-al motions... (?) I can name plenty of incidental motions. tabbott: This is a technical term that neither of us know the meaning of. You'd be better off admitting it, like I am. jhawk: You can show yourself off as a complete fool, or you can be quiet. jbarnold: Yes. You probably don't want to know what the 4 incidental motions would be, however. cporter: Do you think you'd be a better chair than him? [x2] jbarnold: I think Tim would be a competent chairman. Umm. [*pause*] golem: You should just -- like -- not say anything. jbarnold: I'm getting a phone call. Should I accept a phone call during the SIPB meeting? [looks at cell phone] I think Tim would be a competent chairman, that is all. tabbott: I think we have a pretty good feel for what jbarnold would do as chairman. He's done a competent job. A few things could improve, but some of those things I could have done myself if so inclined. I have a reasonable amount of experience with running other organizations ... projects are one of the most important things the chair does. I did not have much luck in getting certain people to do work on scripts[.mit.edu] tasks they had agreed to do. But that was a uniform problem for both of us. I certainly would put effort into getting interesting projects completed, and so on. cporter: If both of you were going to Steer Roast, who would win (in a mud pit fight). jbarnold: Everyone wins a mud pit fight. janetryu: No. tabbott: If false, then anything. janetryu: You guys are supposed to jump up and down and say I would win. jbarnold: [hands above head, gorilla-style] I WOULD WIN!!! tabbott: See, I won't give into this peer pressure. jbarnold: Janet's not my peer. [much laughter] mshaw: Questions are allowed right now! jbarnold: This isn't a game of Truth or Dare, but the field is open for questions. [Executive session: tabbott and jbarnold leave the room. ] [Executive session ends] [Vote: 6 jbarnold, 1 tabbott, 1 abstain, jbarnold is elected] [secy swap from jhawk to tabbott] jbarnold: Let's begin nominations for vice chair. mshaw: I nominate jhawk for vice chair. jbarnold: Second. jhawk: I accept. janetryu: I'd like to nominate tabbott for vice chair. jbarnold: Second. tabbott: I accept. kchen: I nominate mshaw. golem: Second. mshaw: I accept. janetryu: You told me you wouldn't accept! mshaw: Dammit, I lose. [discussion of the vice chair's duties] kchen: Under jtu, I was delegated more work; under jbarnold, I've done less, since he asked me to do less. jbarnold: Time for speeches. jhawk: I strongly believe that SIPB needs to run its servers professionally, and I believe in coming in at 4 AM in order to fix broken services to make people happy. mshaw: I think jhawk would make a better vice chair than me, which is why I nominated him. I would come here at 4 AM and try to fix things, and fail miserably at it. I think I care about SIPB, I think. I got sucked into IAP and didn't actually run away halfway through, and think I would do a good job. [secy swap from tabbott to kchen] tabbott: I think I have less general experience with some of the services we have than jhawk, but I'm willing to learn about them. I understand the vice chair has done less of those duties recently. I'd encourage new services to be created. I'd be willing to come in at 4 AM to fix things, but it would be less effective when I'm not familiar with the service that is broken. During term, I'm typically not up at 4 AM, so I'd probably not spend much time breaking servers then [jhawk had mentioned breaking servers then as a good thing to do as well, if you're going to break them]. It's good not to break servers when they're in use. [yoz walks in] kchen: I nominate Yoyo. tabbott: Second. yoz: Hi. I don't know why I was nominated, and I don't really have a good idea what vice chair does. I would put the vice in a chair. [yoz leaves] [Executive session to talk about the candidates] [secy swap from kchen to tabbott] [Vote: tabbott 4, jhawk 2, mshaw 1, yoz 0, abstain 1] jbarnold: What's the definition of majority again? room: Oh no! What have we done? jbarnold: "More than half", but abstentions don't count. [Ruling: tabbott is vice chair] jbarnold: Treasurer is next. golem: Are we allowed to nominate arolfe? jbarnold: He did specify as to whether or not he was running; thus he is not nominated. tabbott: Someone want to run down to LSC Gencomm to ask arolfe a question? mshaw: I nominate jhawk. golem: Second. jhawk: (accepting) I know more about SAP than anyone else. [no other candidates are nominated]. [jhawk is elected Treasurer without a vote] jbarnold: Secretary. kchen: I nominate mshaw and janetryu. mshaw: I do not accept. janetryu: I do not accept. tabbott: We're running out of people. Um, I nominate golem. golem: I reject that with extreme prejudice. jbarnold: glasser? kchen? glasser: I'm not around enough. kchen: No. jbarnold: All you have to do is bless the minutes. You can get other people to actually take the minutes. tabbott: It's a lie! It's a lie! mshaw: Is there anyone else here who is eligible? tabbott: No. golem: Move to eliminate the position of Secretary and replace it with the Secretary Sucker position. jbarnold: I ignore your motion since the Board does not have authority to override the Constitution. [jbarnold responds to a series of challenges as to the doomfulness of the situation] jbarnold: No, we do not have quorum of the executive committee. jbarnold: The next EC does not take office until the next SIPB meeting. jbarnold: SIPB meetings must be announced to all members at least a week before they are held. tabbott: We could steal people from the LSC meeting... jbarnold: Someone has to be willing to bless the minutes! tabbott: I could suggest the plan of my resigning, jhawk replacing me, and my becoming Secretary again, but jhawk is now treasurer. Alas! jbarnold: If someone contests the results of the election, the existing officers stay in office longer. However, I think a faliure to elect does not cause that. jbarnold: I think we'll eliminate Secretary once we get enough EC people in the room. tabbott: Who will then bless the minutes? golem: Let's create the officer of the funny hat. tabbott: I move to table the election until next week. janetryu: Second. someone: Isn't there an alternative to doing that? tabbott: No, we could sit here and stare at each other until someone agrees to run. tabbott: Is there someone who is not an active voting member willing to take minutes? [no response] jbarnold: Okay, we're tabling it. jbarnold: Now we elect the 5 at-large members of the EC. tabbott: Who has explicitly declined? jbarnold: Nobody. [Vote: yoz 5, wdaher 6, janetryu 2, arolfe 4, golem 3, presbrey 1, kchen 5, keithw 4, aseering 1, glasser 0, xsdg 0, kenta 0, rayhe 3, mshaw 1] jbarnold: yoz, wdaher, kchen, keithw, and arolfe are the new at-large EC members. Office Report: cporter: I think we should get a monitor for milquetoast. jbarnold: What happened to its monitor? asedeno: Is that monitor being used? cporter: Is that the one that needs power supply repair? [many mumblings about how we have extra monitors]. jbarnold: I think we should have a monitor for it. jhawk: We now have Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, including a second copy that I own that people can lend, since the SIPB did not get a second copy. Office Cleaning Report: MIT Computing Report: jbarnold: web has been flaky. jhawk: Apparently, the cause of this has been that the net cell has been flaky; the apparent reason for this is the windows bug that was plaguing the athena cell earlier. Note that it's running Transarc 36, which is extremely old. As an emergency measure, they've been firewalling the net cell in order to prevent the problem from causing further failures. jhawk: Oh yes. The web.mit.edu webservers serve the top level of the MIT homepage out of the net cell, and once the cache manager blocks on one query, the server becomes useless. jhawk: Apparently a mitigating strategy of putting the top-level MIT homepage to local disk was tried and failed. Computer Services: cporter: fustflum, danjared have requested VMs on steve-dallas, and it should be useful soon. kchen: I know glasser wanted one for SVN, but that may be danjared's. cporter: It is. cjdoming: The firefox locker has been updated to 1.5. Thunderbird will follow soon. kchen: I've installed SeaMonkey in the seamonkey locker; it's not very configured yet (no plugins), which I'm hoping to fix. Publications Report: '() Orientation Report: IAP Report: rram: I taught crash course in Java -- it was fun and a learning experience. I put a web survey up about the class. Of the 3 responses I've gotten, the class was enjoyable. jbarnold: We should automate more of the IAP survey process. mshaw: If it means anything, I've been teaching for many years, and put up a survey myself, and also got 3 responses. jhawk: Well, you should hand out paper with a URL. mshaw: No, the best way to do responses is paper. mshaw: I did an email survey, and it didn't work. CokeComm Report: asedeno: I believe this is the last coke. jhawk: Cokecomm has expressed that she is rather miffed that the fridge hasn't been cleaned up, and is awful smelly. jhawk: It isn't cokecomm's responsibility to clean the fridge, it's the SIPB's. janetryu: I thought it was ok. jhawk: Is that before or after you had to pull hard to open the door? cporter: That's not the last coke. There a 12-pack over there. asedeno: That's all Dr. Pepper. Other: cporter: The free VMWare server released last week rocks. Other Other: cporter: Is there an election today? jbarnold: Yes, at the end. The meeting was adjourned at 8:24 PM. Minutes taken and submitted by tabbott.