response 34 of 78:

Feb 6 14:23 UTC 1998

Re: the $1300  Save every dime of it.  It provides us with a little,
and I do consider it little) buffer.  

response 36 of 78:

Feb 6 14:35 UTC 1998

Mark, I certainly sympathize with the feelings you express in #24. It
seems to me I made very similar comments when I was treasurer.  Also,
I'm sorry if some of my comments seem uninformed.  I haven't been 
reading coop lately, so I'm not up on all the budgetary matters.

I didn't mean to suggest earlier that we should just spend the money
willy-nillly.  Certainly having a plan for hardware upgrades is a better
idea than just spending it on impulse buys.  

Even so, any budget plan should take into account several different 
things, including a contingency fund for emergencies, publicity 
expenses, and perhaps increased revenue from a membership drive.

I'll try to bone up on things a little bit more and come to the meeting 
Sunday.

response 38 of 78:

Feb 6 16:24 UTC 1998

Yikes!  According to #24, we paid $2,336.24 of "one-time expenses"
out of the General Fund in 1997.  This is $194.71 per month.  Plus,
Mark says that we actually *lost* $300 (not counting the store) in
1997.  Plus, the just-posted financial report for January says
that we *lost* $635 in January.
        People, we do *not* have a surplus.  We will always have
one-time expenses, whether we use my estimate of $100/mo for the
rest of 1998 or the $194.71/mo which we spent in 1997.
        As to what to do with the money we take in in 1998 over and
above our normal operating expenses, I have two suggestions:
        1.  Get the 670 up.
        2.  Don't spend on *anything* else, since if the recent past
is any indication, *all* of our cash will be eaten up in 1998.
        Am I the only one who is beginning to feel like a Christian
Scientist with appendicitis?
        Thanx for the kind words, Mark.  We treasurers-of-Ann-Arbor-
nonprofit-conferencing-systems have to stick together.   Shoulder
to shoulder, checkbooks in hand, striving for solvency...8-)

response 40 of 78:

Feb 6 17:58 UTC 1998

Thank you, Mark for keeping us on track on this.  I, too, read the numbers.  I
didn't feel informed enough to comment, though.

My usual procedure in these matters is to listen to staff and accounting talk
it through and then try to find compromises that take all concerns into
account.  I was sort of waiting for this discussion to get going and then I
planned to have more to say at the meeting where I hoped to get a better grasp
on the issues.

For the record, I'd like to see us have a 3 month cushion in the bank at all
times and make purchase decisions based on a) technological need and b) impact
on the remainder of the treasury after the cushion is subtracted.

I do feel that occasionally a need may justify dipping into the cushion -- but
a want doesn't.

So, if you subtract that 3 month cushion from the "working budget" how bad does
it look?  Or had you already taken that into account?

response 42 of 78:

Feb 6 20:54 UTC 1998

I wish people would actually read what I said and think about it before
responding negatively to it.

I never said that everybody who is dialing in to Grex has Net access
elsewhere.  I never suggested eliminating all the dial-ups.  However, a lot
of our users who are using the dial-up lines could be telnetting in, and
don't have to be using the dial-up lines.  If those people would start
telnetting in instead, we could both cut some dial-in lines, and possibly
improve our service to the "computer have-nots of Ann Arbor" who do need to
use the dial-up lines.

Valerie, you are one of the people who said telnetting in was too inconvenient
to subject our morally superior local users to it.  I'm not sure why you're
now asking me what's inconvient about it.  I was mainly assuming it must be,
since everybody keeps saying it is.  If the problem is the queue, I've already
pointed out that if people feel so strongly that local users are superior and
need better access, it would be easy to have the telnetd exempt them from the
queue.  We could just have it treat local ISPs the same way it treats things
like the terminal server that are on Grex's local network.

People here also need to acknowledge that it simply isn't true that all local
people can dial up easily.  A lot has changed in terms on Internet access and
modem access since Grex was started.  While there are still some people who
don't have and can't afford access to the Internet, there are also a lot of
people who do have Internet access but don't have easy dial-up access.  I'm
getting extremely tired of being told over and over and over again that the
local users are the ones who contribute to Grex and are important, and that
I'm obviously not a local user.  Should I just stop wasting my time here?

response 48 of 78:

Feb 7 00:48 UTC 1998

okay here's what i see:

Centrex Installation (11/12 of it)                $806.04
 ISDN Installation                                 $634.00
 ISDN Routers (with $795.00 from fund drive)       $355.93
 SIMMs for the new computer                        $248.00
 New Computer (with $1,387.80 from fund drive)      $81.80
 X-10 CP290 Computer Interface                      $40.98
 Renewal of P.O. Box                                $40.00
 Advertising                                        $37.50
 Backup Tapes                                       $28.29
 Reservation of Shelter for Grex B-Day Party        $24.00
 grex.org domain name (with $80 from fund drive)    $20.00
 Renewal of assumed name "Grex" w/ State of Mich.   $10.00
 Corporation Info Update to State of Mich.          $10.00

of the above, 5 items comprising roughly $1917 are one-time technological
upgrade expenses, and the rest (including SIMMs, we may need more)
comprise the remaining roughly $422.  the latter portion includes annual
expenses we can fairly certainly rely on having.  what then is the big scare?

can we seriously look forward to another net connection upgrade in 1998?
that was the biggest chunk of our one-time expenses this year.

i'd like to see a spare motherboard for the 670 as a priority expense, but
even with that, I don't see any rationale on the basis of these numbers for
dpc's chicken little approach.  am i missing something?

response 50 of 78:

Feb 7 01:57 UTC 1998

Eric, admittedly most of the one-time expenses won't recur.  However,
the pattern I see is that last year we had substantial one-time
expenses; that so far this year we have had nearly $500 in one-
time expenses; that we lost money last year; and that we lost a big
pile of money last month.
        The sky is obviously not falling.  However, the downward trend
in cash is, IMO, a real concern.

response 52 of 78:

Feb 7 07:08 UTC 1998

Oh, one more thing I should have included on the list of non-maintenance
expenses from 1997 was local phone calls.  I don't have all the phone bills
(I loaned some of them to STeve), but it looks to me like we spent about $360
last year on local phone calls.  Almost all of those were the link modem
calling ICNET, trying to re-establish the connection.  I don't know if we can
expect to have just as many calls this year or not.

response 54 of 78:

Feb 7 08:30 UTC 1998

It looks to me like a lot of the things marked as one time expenses really
aren't.  I'm assuming the PO Box renewal, the domain name, the assumed name,
and maybe the corporate information update are things that have to happen at
some interval.  Likewise, unless we're going to give up on it, advertizing
is not just a one time cost.  We might be able to make the argument that each
piece of new hardware is a one time cost, but even that gets slippery, since
buying new hardware occasionally is a basic fact of life for any organization
like Grex.

I really don't think we need to look hard for ways to spend our $1300 surplus.
Spending money for the sake of spending money is not a good thing.  If we keep
it around for when we need to buy something, that's probably a much better
use of it.