Jacob Albretsen wrote: > I'm not entirely sure where Peter McNabb (UUG Emperor McNabb III) is these > days, but if the interest in leadership is back, we can hold elections like > we used to do years ago. I'd love to see that happen and finally see the > McNabb Dynasty come to an end. ;) >
Peter is now working with Byron and me at AST. Muahahaha! We have taken your leader, and he is hacking on our Python code now! And now to reminisce... I remember when the first McNabb ran for president. If memory serves, his campaign promise was that he would "rule with an iron fist." I think he was true to that promise, and he has ensured that every McNabb male at BYU did the same. Evan, you have gone down in UUG infamy. I hope you are doing the same at Red Hat. Before Evan, there was Art Moore. And before him, there was Stuart Jansen. And before him, well I don't remember that far back. All through it there was this mysterious machine named "phantom.byu.edu" that lived in the BYUSA custodial closet, a headless, loud box running Red Hat 6 (or maybe even 5, ouch). That was back when Red Hat was free, before they started calling it Fedora (about 13 releases ago). Frank Sorenson graciously cobbled some new hardware together for us, and we upgraded phantom to a RAID/SCSI box and slapped some sweet Debian love on it. It stayed in that lonely closet dutifully serving up uug.byu.edu for us, and one other club (can't recall the name) for a couple years. BYUSA moved the rest of the clubs to a Windows server (shudder), and we had to meet with the VP of clubs to beg for an exception to stay on a *NIX box. I say "beg", because we quite nearly had to get on hands and knees and plead. Painful stuff, but all for a good cause! Those were great days. Now, back to elections. At the meeting when Art was elected (in 2001), he actually did have an opponent if memory serves, maybe even two opponents. All this, even though there were only about 7 people present at the election meeting (remember that Stuart?). I volunteered to be webmaster (of course that was before Django, Drupal, and the term "CMS"), so I created tons of crappy PHP/MySQL code for the club (which we shared with and is still in use by the Florida Linux Users Exchange), and had a great time doing it. Soren and Michael worked with me to create a pretty darn cool site for the day. Art and the crew really got the club rolling back then, with the first install fest in years, the SSS CD, and lots of fun meetings. I see no reason why the club can't be that awesome again. Get out there an do something awesome again UUG'ers! Make your UUG forebears proud! In fact, my company (AST) has offered to supply CDs for install fests and handouts, whenever you need. We can even provide the occasional pizza and presentation (probably once or twice per school year). So take advantage of that! Anyhoo, I hope the UUG can rise to new levels of awesome! It actually seems like it's been pretty good of late. The embedded Linux presentation that Byron gave a few months ago seemed much better attended than any UUG meeting I ever saw in my day. I think UUG is actually doing a lot better than you all may realize (especially considering that BYU CS enrollment is down nearly 50% from when I was there). I'm sure once it's free of the McNabb's iron fists, the UUG will rise to new heights of greatness (no offense, Evan, Andrew or Peter -- please don't hurt me with your metallic, servo-controlled, missile-shooting fists). Happy *NIX'ing. --Dave -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
