Next FCUG meeting - Sunday, May 17

[RobertB]

Greetings, everybody!
     The Fresno Commodore User Group has its next meeting from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m., Sunday, May 17, at

        The Pizza Pit
        2701 N. Blackstone Ave. (corner
        of Blackstone and Princeton)
        Fresno, California

     This month we're asking all members and visitors to try to come to the meeting, because Rory Muir, documentary filmmaker, is coming to ask questions of the group and of Commodore.  She's coming all the way from Hollywood, and this is what she has to say in one of her e-mails --

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Subject:   Re: Fresno Commodore User Group
From:   "R M"
Date:   Wed, April 29, 2009 2:49 pm

As far as the documentary, I don't have any set story I want to tell. The idea would be to document the people and activities of the Commodore Users Group and let the stories unfold from there. If possible, I try to let the themes emerge organically.

As a fan of vintage technologies myself, I can say what initially interested me when I found out about the Commodore User Group was the members' passion for the Commodore computer. From here, themes that may surface may be:

Why Commodore Computers? A bit of history and nuts and bolts of the computer itself. What kind of things Commodore Users are doing with the computers. The camaraderie between Commodore users.

These are just some ideas but I am sure many other interesting themes will present themselves. It would not be a satire, but a true to life look at the Commodore Users Group and the vintage computers they are passionate about. I suppose the piece will be a bit historical, serious, humanistic, and maybe a little fun.

I hope this answers your questions, but feel free to call me and we can talk about it further.

I'd love to come to the May meeting even if the group is small. It would be great to meet you and other members of your local. If the project takes shape we will hopefully meet other members from other parts.

Let me know how all this sounds.
Sincerely,
Rory Muir

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     From what I gather, she won't be filming this time, just gathering information and ideas.
     In other matters, the meeting will concentrate on the details of the July 25-26 Commodore Vegas Expo, and we'll see some of the newest/re-released games from Psytronik Software of England.

         Truly,
         Robert Bernardo
         Fresno Commodore User Group
         http://videocam.net.au/fcug
         July 25-26 Commodore Vegas Expo - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex

[RobertB]

From what I gather, she won't be filming this time, just gathering information and ideas.

Heh, my mistake!  She started filming today!
     Now yesterday she and film partner, Jerold, showed up at the San Jose TOGA meeting, where they asked questions and mostly listened.  Like me, they listened politely to the Windows 7 pre-release demonstration but didn't perk up until the Amiga disks-of-the-month were demoed.  No cameras or other equipment came out, and so, I suspected nothing on their part.
     However, at FCUG today... whoa!... the Sony pro videocamera, the pro-microphones, the boom, the headphones... everything came out as they tried to film our meeting.  I must say that we did very well... we carried on our club conversations (but at a heightened state of awareness) and pretended that the roving camera and mikes were not there, though everybody else in the restaurant saw what was happening and were probably wondering, "What's going on?!"  I warned Stan, the owner, about them, and he was cool about it.  They took plenty of footage of the SX-64 running games, the flat C128 running utilities, the C64 DTV running its games, and even the Vectrex running its multicart (well, I brought the Vectrex for Rory who hadn't seen one since she was little).  And I dropped plenty of information... Notacon/Blockparty a few weekends ago, CommVEx coming up in July, Jeri Ellsworth who developed the DTV, club meetings along the West Coast, etc..  And as they were filmmakers, club talk would detour to talk about film-making, Star Trek, and even Warp 11!  The meeting went seriously over-time, and we didn't get out until 3 p.m..
     They will follow me again next weekend as I rescue PET computers in Riverside, California.

                Is this what reality television is like?
                Robert Bernardo
                Fresno Commodore User Group
                http://videocam.net.au/fcug
                July 25-26 Commodore Vegas Expo - http://www.portcommodore.com/commvex