response 49 of 52:

Dec 21 08:40 UTC 2003

I believe you may be confused about "risk" and "reasonable".  If Mark
were to do things entirely using paper & pencil, then there'd be an
increased risk of data processing errors.  If he were to do things using
a computer that weren't capable of going online, then there would remain
a risk of transcription errors.  Either of these solutions involves
increased hassle and nuisance for him, with decreased value to grex - if
we were to insist he turn his brain off, he might reasonably conclude we
don't need him as treasurer and resign.  That would definitely lead to
bad things on grex.  The position of treasurer on grex is critical to
the smooth running of things, and Aruba has been one of our best and
most patient treasurers ever.  It's unlikely his successor would be
nearly as good, especially if we insist on hobbling our treasurer.

Right now, while windows 98 is hardly ideal, it's old & stupid enough to
be "acceptable".  If Mark were to upgrade to XP, we'd have a problem,
but I think Mark is at least as eager as we all are to not go there.
Someday, in the future, Mark probably will want to upgrade, and we'll
have to negotiate as to what happens then.  There are lots of
possibilities today, and surely there will only be more in the future.

response 51 of 52:

Dec 22 16:02 UTC 2003

Re resp:42: Must be 7.23 that I upgraded to, then.

Re resp:44: True.  I put up with the banner because Opera is the only 
browser that isn't unacceptably sluggish on my 233 MHz Pentium laptop.  
I'm not sure what Opera is doing right that Mozilla/Firebird did wrong, 
but there's a big difference.