Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 11/13/2000


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

In attendance were 
	Voting members: jmorzins golem dmaze nim nathanw tibbetts yak
		kolya amu
	Associate members: cfox jhawk belmonte lnemzer fyfer ingolia
		klmitch jweiss cana | rjbarbal
	Non-voting members: 
	Prospectives: mwp aletta gschmidt dbailey
	Guests: Tim McBride

Treasurer's Report:

	nathanw: She's at LSC.  [channels sly] We got a letter from
		the media destruction people confirming our tapes have
		been destroyed.  There are issues with money for
		network for the machine room; we need to think about
		this.  It's about to get much more expensive, and we
		have the option of making it even more so.  She
		expects to have an accurate budget by next week.

	jweiss: Is sly going to talk to our account person about the
		machine room?

	nathanw: There was mail to sipb-ec and sipb-machine-room with
		the numbers.  I haven't heard anything about
		accomodations being made.

Chairman's Report:

	'()

Office Report:

	jhawk: We have serial stuff.  I ordered the RJ-45 stuff.

	dmaze: The two new chairs showed up.  They look just like the
		old ones.

	jhawk: People shouldn't leave nasty-smelling food in the
		fridge.

	tibbetts: The head-switcher in the rack still sucks.  I'm
		talking to Belkin about sending it back and getting a
		new one.

	jhawk: Nathan [no, amu] brought by the "drinky nerds" comic.

	nathanw: I talked to Alex Prengel about Matlab manuals;
		they're all online PDFs.  They're in the matlab
		locker; we have access to all of them.  We can have
		them printed and bound at Copy Tech for an okay cost.
		The cost of printing the core Matlab manuals is
		~$150.  All told, there are 40 manuals consuming
		13,000 pages.  There's a special command to start a
		Web browser to look at the manuals: matlabdoc.

Office Cleaning Report:

	jmorzins: The fridge is cleaner today than it was a few days
		ago.

	nathanw: Aaron has a torch of death.

	amu: This is a safe torch of death!

	nathanw: We have fewer cans and bottles than we usually do at
		this point in the week.

MIT Computing Report:

	jweiss: As of 34 minutes ago, we have four DCMs per day, up
		from two.  This is nominally in testing, but we didn't
		have any trouble with the first midday one but we're
		not expecting problems now.  The DCMs will run at 1
		AM, 8 AM, 1 PM, and 7 PM.

	tibbetts: What's the script in the consult locker that tells
		you when the mailhubs were last updated?

	jweiss: lastupd.

	jweiss: 8.4.17 is scheduled to go out a week from tonight.  

	nathanw: It has some bugs.

	jweiss: I've been asked to suggest that there may be people in
		SIPB who are interested in being OLC volunteer
		consultants.  They're interested in having volunteer
		help.  You should contact athena-rcc (Yes, the irony
		is astounding).  You can talk to me if you want some
		idea of what's involved.

Computer Services:

	jmorzins: SIPB sponsors several news.answers maintainers.  I
		got mail from a FAQ maintainer who's interested in
		talking with SIPB about the future of news.answers
		moderation.  If people are interested in getting
		involved, talk to me.

	yak: I installed sawfish in the windowmanagers locker.  It's a
		window manager mostly written in Lisp, and it's not
		nearly as slow as any of the other Lisp-based window
		managers.  That said, I still use twm.

SIPB Backup Report:

	nathanw: I suspect they did themselves.

	cfox: They bitched briefly on Sunday.

Publications Report:

	jhawk: We're good.  A little low on cluster cards.

Orientation Report:

	'()

IAP Report:

	nathanw: We're in a holding pattern for about a month and a
		half.

	Tim McBride: If we sent stuff to xela before the deadline, should
		we expect a response?

	cfox: I got mail about mine.

	fyfer: Is xela still away?

	nathanw: He's intermittently connected.

	jhawk: alien is the proxy IAP sucker.

	amu: Contact sipb-iap-sucker for details.

	belmonte: He's currently in Las Vegas.

CokeComm Report:

	nathanw: CokeComm got stuff.  They're even in flats.  People
		who have trained themsevles to use boxes have to
		re-train themselves to use flats.

Other:

	gschmidt: I made hardware-accelerated OpenGL work on the
		cluster Dells.  Files are in my home dir.  It doesn't
		work on the oldest machines.

Other Other:

	jmorzins: We have a small man in a blue bunny suit hanging
		from the ceiling.

	jhawk: I finally ordered something from a vendor where UPS
		sends you the tracking number.  I have a large number
		of unsequenced $2 bills.

	dmaze: gif can kick the Intel bunny-suit guy.

	nathanw: Yet another dot-com is advertising in the men's room
		urinals.


The meeting was adjourned at 19:44.


	Minutes taken and submitted by dmaze.