May 2000 Meeting summary
A summary of May's FinMUG meeting.
BEST LAID PLANS
May 25th FinMUG Meeting – Airport Demo
By Keith Cooper
When Kathy Holton came up with the idea of an iBook/Airport demo for our May meeting
I was enthusiastic and confident. After all, my first experience with Airport was
delightful. I had heard that the initial version of Apple's wireless technology was
a little buggy but when I unboxed my wife's iBook and Airport basestation (a birthday
gift for her) and plugged it in to my cable modem network it just worked. I was really
looking forward to showing off this technology to the group. May's meeting however
had a few ups and downs.
Our first bump in the road was a scheduling conflict that forced us to postpone the
meeting a week from our usual third Thursday. The group took that surprise in stride,
though our attendance Thursday night totaled only nine.
We started out our meeting on a fairly successful note. Our first priority was to
set up a network. I plugged Kathy's PowerBook G3 into the hub along with the Airport
station and we set up a little wired/wireless network. To demonstrate the speed I
shared a 15.3MB file with Kathy who transferred it to her machine in a little over
two minutes. Kathy and I both ooh'd and aah'd over this.
Then we moved on to our internet connection, A friend of mine was kind enough to
offer us the use of her Servtech dialup account. However the basically stable service
chose that night to give us serious fits. I spent the rest of the evening configuring
and reconfiguring the basestation1s internal 56K modem and trying in vain to dial
into the account.
Kathy used this time to give the group general Macintosh advice and support. We discussed
briefly the fact that the group will begin meeting on Tuesdays starting in June and
some questions about what OS X (client) will be like.
I hope to be able to work out the bugs in our connection for a future meeting. The
promise of wireless connectivity is exciting when it works right. I was in the audience
at MacWorld last July when Airport was announced and I remember thinking "That1s
pretty cool." Then nine months later I had a great network in my house sharing
a single cable connection
with a legacy Macintosh clone and a completely "unwired" laptop and I said
"This is really, COOL!!!!!".
Thanks to all who attended for the support and patience that night and hope to see
many of you June 28th for our next meeting.
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