response 5 of 28:

Mar 26 12:09 UTC 1999

I'm not sure we need a meeting just to discuss short-term plans. Do
folks think it would be reasonable to morph the plan-the-budget meeting
into more of a "plan-the-future" meeting, focusing on long-term hardware
and software goals? For this to work, the staff members who specialize
in those issues would need to attend.

response 7 of 28:

Mar 27 05:26 UTC 1999

I really doubt you want to seperate the http server from the main login
server.  It looks like you might want to seperate the mail functionality,
but AFAIK you probalby aren't planning to buy a new piece of hardware to make
that happen.

A bit of a surplus is certainly a good thing.  I don't want to see grex
end up with the constant fundraising that m-net has.

If there's consistently a lot of surplus money, the obvious thing to do is
buy a faster connection to the internet.  But I don't think that there's
such excess of money.

I suspect that it will be easier to acquire better, faster computers than
it will be to get a faster net connection.

I don't think it's really a problem if there's no grand vision for the future.
grex has been doing good things, and it can continue to do those things.

response 9 of 28:

Mar 28 13:42 UTC 1999

Yes, please do. That'll get the ball rolling on discussion.

response 11 of 28:

Apr 1 00:47 UTC 1999

Mark is about to invest in a mutual fund, see the item on changing banks. 
A very low-risk money market fund (the shares are almost guaranteed not to
change in value, interest varies and is a bit lower than riskier funds).
Estimated interest is about 4-5%, or over $100/year.

response 13 of 28:

Apr 1 01:01 UTC 1999

I thought a mutual fund was anything that lots of people invested in jointly,
thereby sharing the profits and the risks.  Anyone know for sure?

response 15 of 28:

Apr 1 11:23 UTC 1999

You haven't noticed what day it is yet, have you, Joe?

Set your pager to something else & you'll see things as they are.  (My pager
isn't doing the stuff you're seeing ... though I'm still somehow seeing the
bizarre rseps, such as "Rane Curl Ringworld Rane" and "Jan Wolter Jedi Jan".)

Or wait until tomorrow, and do "read since 4/1" to reread everything in a more
normal fashion.

response 17 of 28:

Apr 2 23:44 UTC 1999

How did the jokers manage to program this one?  There did not seem to be any
way to correctly select thou and thy for the different 'you's, but they did
a pretty good job with verbs.  It should be dost thou not do thou, like art
thou.  Clever.  Except it might possibly have offended a retired friend that
we were introducing to grex that day to see people called Ancient.  I
explained it was just an April Fool's joke.

response 19 of 28:

Apr 4 12:45 UTC 1999

Heh. The first couple of years Grex was in operation, I did the April
Fool stunts. The first one -- the infamous "Mary Poppins Filter" --
seemed genuinely traumatizing to a couple of people, although I didn't
intend it that way.

Getting back to the topic of this item -- any further thoughts on budget
planning?

response 21 of 28:

Apr 5 09:42 UTC 1999

(Should we tell him?  ;-)

response 23 of 28:

Apr 6 17:05 UTC 1999

The Mary Poppins filter was a little program that I wrote and
installed as the default pager in Agora on April 1, 1992.  When-
ever the name "Mary Poppins" showed up in a response, it would
replace it by the name of the person reading the response.  So
if a response contained the sentence "Mary Poppins sprinkles
pepper on her tea", then John Smith would see "John Smith sprinkles
pepper on her tea" and Sue Brown would see "Sue Brown sprinkles
pepper on her tea". A lot of folks got the impression they were
being talked about when they really weren't. Good for instilling
paranoia.

I'd first tried out this filter on M-Net, several years before
Grex existed. It was inspired by a a conversation between myself
and Brian Howard (then bdh, now bdh1) at a Picofest. I forget which
of us first suggested the idea.

Hm, what a digression. Maybe we should get back to planning the
meeting to plan the budget?

response 25 of 28:

Apr 17 11:05 UTC 1999

The tentatively suggested date - April 18 - for a plan-the-budget
meeting is almost upon us. The sense I get is that we're not ready
for it. I'm inclined to agree with Jan in resp:2 that some planning of
Grex's technical future is needed before we can make long-range budget
plans. Does anyone feel differently?

response 27 of 28:

Apr 18 18:07 UTC 1999

Yup, today was the tentatively scheduled date.  There really doesn't
seem to be much to discuss.  I've heard a rumor that Marcus has a draft
plan, but I haven't seen it.  So we should probably postpone this until
we have some ideas.