Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 10/23/2000


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

In attendance were 
	Voting members: golem dmaze lgdean tibbetts alex_c nathanw nim
		kolya gif amu | yak
	Associate members: eichin jweiss ingolia lnemzer ocschwar
		belmonte cana zacheiss tytso jhawk rjbarbal
	Non-voting members: 
	Prospectives: eisenbud aatharuv mwp gschmidt | dbailey
	Guests: paisa

Treasurer's Report:

	jhawk: Michigan.

Chairman's Report:

	'()

Office Report:

	jweiss: We do have an office.

	tibbetts: I want to buy another telephone.  We currently have
		four.  The one between mkc and jhawk tends to float
		around the office and is in odd places.  It'd be nice
		to have machines at both the back and middle of the
		office.  It should cost ~$100 to install; I want to
		allocate $150 for the installation, and $50/month.

	jweiss: The phones are actually rented.  The charge is for
		that and the line hookup. [tytso seconds]

	jhawk: This is a waste of $600/year.  We can usually find a
		free phone in the office; sometimes this involves
		moving a phone.  It's unlikely that having an extra
		phone would make the phones more likely to be
		answered.

	jweiss: I've wanted to be in the laptop space and on the phone
		at the same time.  Not everybody has a WaveLAN; an
		extra phone would be convenient.

	belmonte: I have many times found myself in the situation that jweiss
		described.  I think it's worth runnning back and forth
		between a telephone and a computer to save $600 a
		year, though.  This expense doesn't seem justifiable.

	golem: Is this linear, or did we hit some step function?  Do
		each of the phones we have now cost $50/mo. each?
		[yes]

	jhawk: If mobility is the issue, we might consider
		investigating wireless headsets instead.

	tytso: Phones come out of a different budget, no?  [it's all
		one budget]

	jhawk: I think the treasurer might have an opinion.  We might
		consider deferring.

	golem: Could jhawk describe the headset technology?

	jhawk: there are frobs that plug in in place of handsets, with
		~800MHz wireless.

	rjbarbal: Move to postpone for a week so we can research more
		options.

		[original motion withdrawn]

	golem: We should actually solve our phone problem.

	eichin: There was a legitimate fire alarm earlier this week.
		Sometimes evacuating is a good idea.  It was in the
		elevator shaft; someone tossed a cigarette down the
		shaft, and started a small smouldering fire in the
		trash at the bottom.

Office Cleaning Report:

	ingolia: The office cleaning not-fish should be working
		again.  If it starts acting oddly, send me mail.

	nathanw: The office got vacuumed at least once this week.

MIT Computing Report:

	zacheiss: 8.4.15, 8.4.16 for IRIX goes out tonight.

	nathanw: It seems like we've had a patch release a week for a
		long time now.  Actually, one every other week.

Computer Services:

	kolya: www has been happier.  We're still playing with it.  It
		crashed Saturday.

	eichin: Saturday morning, it was down for 10-12 hours.

	jhawk: The machine room switch has been quoted, and the
		ordering process initiated.  It should alleviate some
		but not all of the congestion on 18.181/16.  It should
		help backup-related and other not-news-related
		congestion.  It won't help the outside-world
		connection.

	zacheiss: The stuff we're buying from Sun should show up in
		the next two weeks or so.

SIPB Backup Report:

	zacheiss: Yeah.

Publications Report:

	cana: Everything listed as being here is here in copious
		amounts, except for maybe NetNews.  The Usenet
		one-sheet has only a dozen left.

	tibbetts: That should last us a quarter.

Orientation Report:

	tibbetts: I still haven't sent the frosh mail.  Someone
		should.

	alex_c: What's the deadline?  [none, really]

	tibbetts: We should use our _Tech_ ad space to convince people
		we exist, but I don't feel like we're in a position to
		do that.  This may be personal angst on my part.  I
		think SIPB sucks, but that's me.  [golem seconds]
		Move to revamp the entire SIPB membership policy.
		[chair forestalls discussion]

IAP Report:

	jhawk: Are we expecting alien?

	nathanw: I'm vaguely expecting she's handling stuff, but I
		don't know whether I should expect her here.

	tibbetts: It's too late to get your class into the printed
		catalog, but nobody uses it, so you can still get your
		classes in the online version.  It's also good to
		reserve a room as soon as possible.  The online
		version doesn't suck and is updated more than the
		paper version.

CokeComm Report:

	tibbetts: There's Coke, there's Mountain Dew, that's it.

	gif: Run in about a week.

Other:

	dmaze: openjade is installed and works for i386_linux22;
		barring problems, I'll install it as the default jade
		for Sun and SGI.  It's an SGML processing tool.  Given
		an input file (e.g. DocBook), it produces RTF, HTML,
		or TeX from the output, and the TeX can be turned into
		PDF or DVI.  This is useful if, say, your resume is in
		SGML format and recruiters want RTF.  JobTrak sucks!

	eisenbud: Mozilla M18 is up on sun4x_57, I hope to have it up
		for Linux later this week.  It's not a debug build.
		The current version runs reasonably fast, unlike a
		debug build.

Other Other:

	jhawk: I'm not speaking at LSC, nor am I East Campus's mother.

	ocschwar: Hey Rocky, watch me pull Douglas Adams out of my
		hat!  2 Nov at LSC.  [That trick never works...]

	belmonte: Is jhawk SIPB's mother?

	tibbetts: East Campus's mother is quite overweight.

	lgdean: Random's mother is battling Next House's mother in
		UMOC this week.

	tibbetts: The restaurant formerly known as Networks might be
		better pronounced "TRFKAN" [turf-can].


The meeting was adjourned at 19:46.


	Minutes taken and submitted by dmaze.