Dreamhost recently changed the e-mail server for all of my sites, including this one. A lovely little side effect of the change is that they seem to have blown away all of my spam filtering, flooding my inbox with thousands of spam e-mails over the last several days.

Holee crapola.

Sorry if you sent an e-mail over the last several days that never received an answer. (I have no excuse for not answering any e-mail sent prior to this spamming spree, but I hope you forgive that, too.) I’ll try and answer you shortly.

I’m moving the site over to a different hosting account so stceo.org will temporarily show up either empty, partially empty, or completely unavailable for a few hours or longer while I move the files and the DNS settings propagate. E-mails to @stceo.org accounts may also bounce during this period of time.

A temporary copy of the site has been uploaded to http://www.stceo.net, if you’re not able to access stceo.org at the moment.

Thanks.

I’ve been an absentee STC chapter president for the last year, perhaps longer. I stayed on as president for 2008/2009 only because no one else stepped forward to fill the role. The general burnout of the chapter board combined with the marked apathy of the membership led to us not holding a competition this year for the first time since, well, since we started holding competitions  many, many years ago. And we’ve held no program meetings, not even the Fall kick-off. We’ve dropped into a black hole and no one really noticed. Or, worse, they’ve noticed but just didn’t give a damn. I’ve had emails from a total of about five people since the chapter year started asking what was going on with some aspect of the chapter. Five. And one of those was a non-member.

When I joined this organization and this chapter, I was full to bursting with a very annoying amount of enthusiasm. I could see the chapter fading and didn’t want to see it disappear. Unfortunately, it seems I may end up being the president (or rather the “acting president”) who ushers the chapters into the afterlife.  It’s so not the position I thought I’d ever be in.

The ship is going down, folks.

(This is a copy of the notice that I just posted on the chapter’s home page.)

We’ve always had difficulty finding sufficient enthusiastic volunteers to run the chapter. Enthusiasm is difficult to sustain in a vacuum.

Apathy

This past year’s chapter executive consisted primarily of people who hadn’t volunteered for the job but had agreed to stay on to keep the chapter going at a minimum activity level. It’s been an interesting experiment. We didn’t hold a competition this year and only one person contacted us to ask about it. We haven’t had any program meetings at all this year and less than a handful of people over the entire year have asked about it. Those are two of the key offerings this chapter has. If no one really noticed their absence (or noticed but didn’t care), then does the chapter really serve any useful purpose?

Is there a future?

We’re facing the very real prospect of shutting down the chapter. Unless someone comes forward with a full slate of candidates for the 2009/2010 board, we will be forced to take steps to dissolve the chapter, probably by the end of the calendar year. “Full slate” means at the very least a president, a vice-president, a treasurer, and a secretary. If you want program meetings to resume, you’ll also need a program manager. If you want a competition this coming year, you’ll also need a competition manager. If you want a newsletter, you’ll need someone for that as well. And they need to have a decent measure of enthusiasm or you’re just prolonging the inevitable.

I’ve opened the nominations form. You can also e-mail me if you’re interested. Nominations are open until at least June 15, 2009.

Kitty MacAlpine
Acting President
2008/2009 STCEO Board

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about being careful when you order a cake from the supermarket because they will spell it exactly as it reads — if it’s misspelled, they’ll misspell it on the cake; if there’s a typo, they’ll include the typo on the cake. Similar things happen with printers and other service providers to whom you submit your job electronically. Savvy recipients of potentially problematic orders would confirm them (I would hope). One wonders which direction the translation error occurred — was it being translated from English into Chinese or Chinese into English? Obviously the software was functioning in English.

The Chinese characters to the left apparently mean (literally) “food hall” or “canteen”.

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