SIR Area 2

Computer and Technology Group

 

Webmaster Phil Goff

philgoff@yahoo.com

 

AREA 2 COMPUTERS AND TECHNOLOGY

Meeting Summary for November 17, 2011

PRESENTATION: Online Backup for Your Computer (ppt)  (pdf)

and Online Shopping for Christmas (ppt)  (pdf) by Phil Goff

 

Phil Goff opened the meeting at 9:00am.  Executive Committee members attending were Phil Goff, Derek Southern, Neil Schmidt, Dean Steichen, Dick Curry, Jack Bevis, Bill Phelon and Barry Brown. Total attendance was 59.

Since last month Lo McCarley has resigned from the CAT board.

Phil started us off with a residual from last months PG&E presentation. He had a meter that was discussed last month that measures how much power a device in you house is drawing at any given time. He said it only cost about $18 and might be worth having. He found that his nice bright Christmas tree was consuming 600 watts.

Then some more fun trivia. MySpace.com was so popular a few years ago that it was purchased for $547MM. It shot up in value to $12 Billion. Then along came Facebook.com. Today MySpace.com is worthless.

Phil’s presentation covering Online/Cloud storage and backup is reviewed below as well as his 2nd presentation about on line shopping.

After the break Bob Zimmerman told us about two interesting weather web sites that he uses. Stormpulse.com tracks weather and storms around the world.  The second site, Calacademy.org has a live web cam on the Farallon islands that you can control. This gives views of the island and the seas off shore.

Barry Brown donated various articles and books for another raffle, which came next.

We adjourned at 11am.

Jack Bevis, Secretary

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PRESENTATION SUMMARY

ONLINE BACKUP by Phil Goff (ppt)  (pdf)

Phil said that when he put this presentation together it turned out to be more complicated than originally thought.

He covered three basic types of Cloud services. There is online storage service, which is like a great big blank hard drive in the sky. There are Backup Services that allow you to schedule backups and perform incremental backups. And finally, there is Synchronization that combines both storage and backup.

Refer to Phil’s slides that are posted on the club website. You will see that he covers the types of backups that you can make, the media on which they can be stored and some of the service providers that are available.

He names and describes some popular free cloud storage and synchronization services.

He closes with a description of his personal backup strategy and this admonition: If you don’t backup—don’t call me!

ONLINE SHOPPING FOR CHRISTMAS by Phil Goff (ppt)  (pdf)

Phil had some fun with this one. He says that if you don’t shop online now, you should.

Shopping is easy and many times you do not pay sales tax.

Amazon sells everything so go there first. They also have a great wish list function that should be tried.

See his slides that identify a number of other shopping web sites.