Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2007-09-03


The meeting was called to order at 19:30 by nelhage.

In attendance were 
	Voting members: andersk ctl geofft jhawk jwalden k_lai
		mathmike nelhage shahid spang tilia yoz | kchen jbarnold
	Associate members: mitchb ocschwar
	Prospectives: dbates01 drews kaduk mclamb tvald wangaj | dvp
	Guests: 

Officer Reports:
	nelhage: Welcome to all the freshman, first year grad
		students, and people new to SIPB.  We’re going to
		start with introductions.  [introduces SIPB]
	nelhage: I’m Nelson, the SIPB vice chairman.
	tvald: I’m Tony.
	wangaj: I’m Andrew.
	drews: I’m Drew.
	ocschwar: I’m Omri, member.
	kaduk: I’m Ben.
	andersk: I’m Anders, SIPB secretary.
	jwalden: He likes Unicode.
	geofft: I’m Geoffrey Thomas, member.
	dbates01: I’m David.
	spang: I’m Christine, member.
	shahid: I’m Shahid, member.
	ctl: I’m Chris, member.
	jwalden: I’m Jeff Walden.
	k_lai: I’m Katherine, member.
	mathmike: I’m Mike, member.
	mitchb: I’m mitchb, member.
	yoz: I’m Yoyo, member.
	jhawk: I’m John, member.
	tilia: I’m Tilly, SIPB treasurer.
	mclamb: I’m Jeff McLamb.
	kchen: I’m Kevin, member.
	dvp: I’m Dennis.

	tilia: Spend money.  But not too much.

	nelhage: It turns out that the ASA requires our treasurer to
		be a current student.  Next week we’ll be holding an
		election for a new treasurer.  If any current EC
		members are elected treasurer we’ll also have to hold
		an EC election.

MIT Computing Report:
	geofft: Cluster printers got de-kerberized.  This is a good
		thing for people having trouble getting klpr to work
		on their systems.

	mitchb: Something has changed causing people to get a lot less
		spam.  We’re not sure what it is.

	jhawk: The cluster got a delivery of lots of green bar paper.

SIPB Projects Report:
	nelhage: Saturday at 5:00, in the office, we’ll be having a
		SIPB hackathon.  We have hackathons once a month
		roughly, where we order food and work on SIPB
		projects.  This is a great change for freshmen to find
		out about what’s going on.  If you have cool project
		ideas, show up and talk to us.

	nelhage: The EC voted to allocate money for all these events
		[hackathon, stories, tours] by email.  It’s in the
		sipb-ec-discuss archive if you care.
	yoz: We have $75 for stories and $75 for tours.

	nelhage: Quentin wants to allocate up to $300 for new RAM for
		sliced-bread, a SQL server.
	jhawk: This is not adding additional RAM, it’s replacing
		existing RAM, that isn’t under warranty?
	nelhage: That’s my understanding.  There are hardware problems
		that may be related to bad RAM.
	<8-0-2, motion passes>

Office Report:
	nelhage: We had a pizza party in the office this weekend, and
		there was an office cleaning before it.

Education Report:
	nelhage: We have a couple of upcoming events this week to
		welcome the freshmen to SIPB.  At Wednesday at 8, room
		4-231, we’re having story time with Jeff Schiller, the
		MIT network architect and a SIPB member.  He’s in
		charge of maintaining the network infrastructure, and
		he’s a great storyteller with a lot of great stories.

	nelhage: Thursday at 7:30, we’re having SIPB computer tours.
		We’ll be touring several of the machine rooms that run
		the Athena network and infrastructure, as well as some
		areas in CSAIL.  Leaving from Lobby 7 at 7:30.
	mclamb: I have some fliers for members to post where they live.

	geofft: There have been these Ask SIPB columns for the last
		week in the Tech.  Apparently I have committed to
		writing Ask SIPB columns every two weeks during terms.
		If you have ideas for columns, or better yet if you
		want to write these columns, get in touch with me.

	nelhage: There are freshmen on campus.  Some of them are here.
		Welcome.

	mitchb: I don’t currently know all the details, but we should
		plug cluedumps.
	nelhage: During the Fall term, SIPB is going to be running
		cluedumps every Monday after the meeting, at 8:30.
	mclamb: 56-114 or 1-190.
	nelhage: Cluedumps are short, roughly 1 hour, presentations on
		some technical topic of interest to the SIPB
		community.  The first one is about the Athena
		architecture.  The schedule is/will be available at
		<http://cluedumps.mit.edu/>.

Other:
	nelhage: “Other” is for anything else relating to SIPB or SIPB
		members that don’t strictly fall into the other areas.

	mclamb: Were there new faces at the pizza party?
	nelhage: There were some.

Other Other:
	jhawk: Can anyone recommend voltmeters with RS-232 output?
	nelhage: I’ll assume that’s a no.

	ocschwar: Newly re-edited version of Blade Runner at the
		Venice Film Festival.

	geofft: I have Halo 3–flavored Mountain Dew that contains
		vegetable oil.

	jbarnold: The introductory course 6.01 is using Debathena on
		its course laptops.

Discussion Report:

The meeting was adjourned at 19:50.


	Minutes taken and submitted by andersk.