Art Auction The auction continues to be open and ready for you to send your items. For the first time ever, I’ve had the courage to submit something. I put in a martini glass I made a few years ago that was sitting around collecting dust. I was surprised at how easy it was easy to submit.
Here’s a link with instructions
Scroll to the bottom to read the simple details. As a teaser here’s a pic of my glass. I bet you can do better than I did. Send something in, I dare you. We need submissions.
Symposium planning The schedule is slowly gelling. I now have content from 9 of the 16 presenters. We’ve zoomed past several deadlines for submission. I’m hoping that the next (and final) deadline will do the trick and get folks to send in their recordings. Without them we have no symposium.
Video Library After a monumental effort by Steve Scranton, Don Gossard Jill Korgimagi and myself; the ASGS video library is officially out of development and in beta testing. It seems that the technical kinks have been worked out. Select people are now testing it looking for ways to break it. I hope they fail. At the moment there are less than a dozen videos up for testing. In time there will be several hundred, our video library is extensive, dating back decades.
Soon you will be able to search the entire library by:
- Year
- Location of filming (Symposium location)
- Author (presenter’s name)
- Newest/oldest date of recording
- Keyword search (any word in the title or description)
- Hashtag search (a long list of words assigned by the editors to describe content. You’ll be able to scroll down the list or manually type a word.
This will be an epic upgrade to member benefits. We’ve been waiting for years to provide our members with a way to watch ASGS symposium videos again. It used to be that a CD was sent each year with video of the previous year’s symposium demos. That was stopped quite a while ago as being too expensive.
The new online video library will be searchable. These search features took a long time to get right. There will be way too many videos to randomly scroll through the list, looking for what you want. If you can’t find what you want it it’s as good as not being there and we’ve failed you. Steve our Webmaster guru has spent the past 4 months wrestling the various search options into submission. It hasn’t been easy. I’ve lost track of how many times it looked like it was going to work and then didn’t. I’m happy to say, it’s working now and with any luck our beta tester breakers will fail and you’ll get to try it for yourself by the end of the month. Stay tuned.
Methods and Materials Handbook Don in the home office spent a bunch of time going through this historic pdf document on the website adding chapter titles and a hyperlinked table of contents at the front. It’s now easy to scroll through the table of contents, click on a chapter heading and be right there. You can also search for any word in the document (vacuum, HF, kovar etc. It’s a pretty neat document Take a look here.
Insurance Everyone’s favorite topic of discussion (not) I’m happy to report that as a result of my questioning, Don investigating, and Kevin playing devils advocate, we’re on track to reduce our annual insurance bill from $7,100 to $1,900, a savings of $5,200 per year. The board will be reviewing this and voting on the change next week. The new coverage is better with Directors and Officers liability coverage now reaching down to the section level. This is new. Previously only section directors and meetings were covered. Going forward section officers (Chair, Assistant chair Secretary, Treasurer) are also covered.
