 The
day dawned sunny & hot. Early morning rays found volunteers
and board members hard at work transforming the Art Building at the Josephine
County Fairgrounds into a building fit for a Mac Expo. The day was packed from start to finish. Garr
Reynolds, former User
Group Program Director at Apple provided our opening keynote at 10 am.
In the hours that followed, we packed in 5 presentations.
Elizabeth Statmore with CircusPonies gave a very impressive
demonstration on their NoteBook program. Bob Loeser, from our local Mac
store, Valley Software, gave
us the WWDC Shakedown - wowing us with the new power of the G5, and deftly
skirting all the involved technogeek.
We took a break to recover and dove into our first of two awesome raffles.Our
vendor sponsors provided a huge variety of software and books. We had
so much to give away that we made the cutoff line between raffles & doorprizes
$20. If it was over, it went to the raffle, if under, we added it to
the door prize pile. Our grand raffle prize for this round was a copy
of Adobe GoLive.
If presentations didn't fit your bill, during all this time we had
a computer gaming area holding it's own tournaments with prizes during
the day. The list of games stretched close to 20, and none of the computers
spent too much time empty. Steve Welsh, President of the Oregon Statewide MUG (OMUG), brought us
a taste of "YDKM" Trivia - a shadow of what's to come in November.
Garr Reynolds brought us the "how to" on making a useful presentation
using Keynote. What to include & how to stay away from the tacky.
Karen Denman, one of our own members wrapped up our presentations with
Deneba Canvas. With a history of professional photography & journalism
showed how easy it was to create a flyer. Taking pictures of willing
folks & building a flyer to commemorate the expo.
By now, interest was growing in the remaining pile of raffle items.
We had split the goodies into two close to equal piles, and worked through
the smaller items, ending with the item of the highest value as the grand
raffle item. This round found the grand raffle to be a full copy of Microsoft
Office X.
Very few left empty handed. If you didn't win during the raffle, you
had the opportunity for a door prize. Armed with a box of books and t-shirts,
I pulled off my favorite "freebie toss" to the lucky folks
who had matching door prize numbers.
During the day, our vendors saw the crowds come and go. Martin's Printing
and Graphics, a local large format printer joined us, and also donated a
free enlargement print for the raffle. Circus Ponies was on hand to make
it possible for folks to ask more questions and get their own copy of NoteBook.
Both Steve Welsh & Steve Travis from OMUG gave everyone an opportunity to
dip their toes into the events of "You Don't Know Mac" - the statewide MUG
event of the year. Valley Software, our local Mac Store, & Zotz Digital,
kept interest with showing the iSight LIVE!
Without our sponsoring vendors, this event would not have been the same.
A BIG thank-you goes to each one of them for the products they donated
for the event. These vendors are strong supporters of MUGs in the community
and across the county.
Stop by our gallery to relive the great time we had. For those who work with numbers, we had
about 150 in attendance (including volunteers). The majority of those people
did say they use a mac, but most weren't current JoMacs members. We're
looking forward to getting better aqainted with everyone who said they'd
like more info. Drop in and see us at any meeting. |
It was HOT in more ways than one!
