Category: President’s Blog

I recently had a great Zoom call with Kelley and Don at the home office plus Steve our webmaster. We worked through several back end issues with our aging website infrastructure. The new change is posting updated Treasurer’s reports. The new system makes it much easier to load these reports so we stay current. Take a look in the downloads area for the new reports. I’m looking into other report possibilities as well. I feel strongly that we need to provide ways for any interested member to stay as current as possible with what your board is working on. This is a good step forward.  We also explored the ongoing struggle of being able to search Fusion and Proceedings back issues online. Unfortunately there seems to be no easy fix. Steve has been working with the plug in developer for months looking for a way to solve the problem (our website is out of date) There is still hope they will find a way to solve this in the short term. The long term solution is a new modern website. I’ve started the conversations needed to move in that direction and hope we can have something fresh and functional (like the symposium website) deployed as our main website before the end of the year. It’s quite an undertaking as we need the website to do quite a lot of stuff. This means the back end (the hidden software behind what you see) had to be designed correctly from the start instead of being added onto, and patched, and manually adjusted which is what we’ve been limping along with. Stay tuned… more to come on this topic.  The symposium is approaching fast. If you haven’t yet please consider attending and staying at the hotel. Enrollment has been less than expected. There is lots of room. We’re working hard to finalize presenters, tee shirts, programs, schedule adjustments, logistics for exhibitors, art poster printing, and a pile of small details that need attention.  Next year’s symposium team is gradually pulling together. Look for an announcement in the next week or so about 2026 dates and a location. Erich MorainePresident Elect

Chris Hurley has been working for several months on the artwork for this year’s symposium. He’s gotten another awesome deal from last year’s artist and has already received the original art. It will be auctioned off at this year’s art auction. Show up with your credit card ready! The bidding for proof #1 last year was intense. This year we’ve got the original as drawn by the artist. It will be amazing to see what happens.  Chris H. has moved the original through getting a high res scan which is now at color separation, in preparation for high quality prints to be made. If you can’t afford the original, rest assured there will be prints available. He’s also working with Bob Singer and Chris Bock to get tee shirts made for this year. They will be added to our website merch store and probably available in person at the symposium. To help with our uncertain financial situation this year’s Art Auction proceeds as well as merch sales will go to supplement the ASGS budget until we are back on solid ground again. Erich Moraine President Elect

Sometimes I hear folks complain about the cost of attending a meeting in person, either a section meeting or the annual symposium. It’s true these things cost money and time to attend. So why would you want to hand over hard earned dollars and hop in your car for a few hours or spend a day in airports traveling? Here’s what happened to me last Sat at the recent Midwest Section meeting: There was a last minute add to the demos for the day, someone who flew in from California. They demoed tooling a hose barb. I’m always happy to watch and learn something. The tooling demo was great but he interesting thing was the forming tool they used. It had rollers instead of fixed jaws. As it turns out I’ve got a potential job request right now which requires me to tool a fitting onto a finished soft glass object, and I need to do it on the lathe because of it’s size. I hand made a set of graphite jaws to fit into conventional tooling pliers but was having trouble with the glass dragging and wrinkles forming because of rotating only in one direction. Those roller jaws seemed ideal, little to no drag and no chance of hooking the soft glass on the edge of the tool.   I asked where did you get them from, I need a pair right now.The answer was they were in the shop when I took over, they’re no longer made. Someone else watching the demo said they might be old school Herbert Arnold tooling pliers and agreed they had not been made in decades.  Darn so close and yet so far, no solution. On the way home from the meeting, while I was thinking about how I might try to make a pair myself, I got a text from another meeting attendee.It included a screen grab from someone’s IG account showing exactly this style of tooling pliers made new and for sale. I felt like they’d just handed me a winning lottery ticket.  After a quick DM I found out they make custom profiles as well as stock stuff. After approval from my customer the order for the miracle tool is going in. This switched my project from a maybe that wasn’t paying anything to a multi thousand dollar order, because I asked questions and happened to be at a section meeting in person. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. Stories like this this is what the society is about, sharing knowledge, and in this case sharing resources. So take the time, spend a few $, attend a meeting. Who knows what winning Lottery ticket you’ll go home with. Erich Moraine President Elect

Several new pages have been added to the website to begin to showcase our sponsors and advertisers. It’s been known for some time now that we could do a better job giving companies greater visibility within the society. Last year Klaus Paris rolled out the first(?) sponsor packages for companies. This year we’ve expanded on that a bit and are looking for more ideas. When you get a chance take a look at the benefactors page. We also have our first corporate sponsor: AGI / H. S. Martin Thank you to Leah Granville at AGI for working with Don Gossard in the home office to make it happen. We couldn’t be happier. What happens next is our Marketing Team (Carolyn Reiner and Denise Bui with help from Kelley and Don) will keep track of the various pieces of AGI’s sponsorship package to make sure our sponsor feels well cared for.  Erich Moraine President Elect

Last Friday we had the first ever ASGS Glass Happy Hour Zoom call. This is Sean Donlon’s awesome idea for how to build connection among members, learn more about glass, and have some fun doing it. Each of us had time to talk about a cool glass project we were working on while sharing the beverage of our choice via Zoom. We got to see some really interesting projects. My favorite was Sean’s all glass, working replica of a fly casting reel! It was truly amazing. We also got to hear a story from Bryce Thomas and his hair raising adventure in repairing a 200? mm fritted funnel. I had no idea they made frits that big and I’m sure glad I didn’t have to try to repair it. Interestingly this led into a lengthy conversation about frit sealing techniques where Kyle Meyer shared a cool tip for permanently labeling the frit before sealing in so you’ll always know what porosity it is. Keep a lookout for an announcement for the next Glass Happy Hour. You missed a good one last Friday. Erich Moraine (President elect) 

I’m a bit nervous and excited about launching this. It’s been a while in coming. The hope is that with frequent, regular, posts all of our membership will have a better idea of what’s happening in the Society. It may not be obvious but there’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make this a better experience for everyone. Check out “The Annealer” It’s going to become communication central. All announcements from the home office will show up there. The President’s Blog is there. There are plans to add a number of other news and information features in the future.  This week we’ve also launched the start of the ASGS texting campaign. It’s taken quite a while to pull together. Thanks to Don Gossard our contact at IMI it’s now functional and working. This new feature will allow members to select whether they prefer to be contacted via email  or via text. The first step is to send an email to all members asking if they’d like to do texts or emails. (The irony of this does not escape me.)  If you didn’t get that email you can hop on the website (on your phone or laptop) click on the “Contact Us” menu item on the home page and fill in the pop up form. OR send a text to the new ASGS texting number: (716) 558-9695 with a “Join” request and your email address in the text body. Here’s what I texted: Join erich.moraine.asgs@gmail.com I don’t understand why I need to give an email address in order to get texts but that’s what Constant Contact, our communication service provider, wants.   It’s going to take a few months to get the news out to those who absolutely positively do not use email. Feel free to help reconnect these folks with the ASGS and spread the word about texting.  Erich Moraine (President-elect)