[sf-lug] meetup?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bob Remeika (bob.remeika at gmail.com):

> I've never been to a sf linux user group meeting before and was interested
> in going.

Cool!  I expect and hope you'll enjoy it.

>  When and where is the next meeting?

Here, let me work that out for you (the ":r!" incantation being a way of
showing my having done shell escapes from vi's colon command prompt to
bash, and read the result of the commands back into the buffer to
include in this message):

:r! lynx -dump http://www.sf-lug.org/ | grep -A 3  "first Sunday"

   SF-LUG meetings are the first Sunday of the month, 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM,
   and third Monday of each month, 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM. Meetings are
   usually in San Francisco at the Cafe Enchante on Geary Boulevard at
   26th Avenue.

:r! cal -3 

    October 2009         November 2009         December 2009      
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa  
             1  2  3   1  2  3  4  5  6  7         1  2  3  4  5
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   8  9 10 11 12 13 14   6  7  8  9 10 11 12
11 12 13 14 15 16 17  15 16 17 18 19 20 21  13 14 15 16 17 18 19
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  22 23 24 25 26 27 28  20 21 22 23 24 25 26
25 26 27 28 29 30 31  29 30                 27 28 29 30 31      
                                                                
The rest is left as a (very small) exercise for the reader.  ;->

Yes, the guys who maintain the Web site do need to update it, but, 
really, it's really not that hard to figure out when the next first
Sunday or third Monday is going to be.   /usr/bin/cal is your 
friend.

Hey, Web page maintainers:   Might I make a modest suggestion for site
maintenance?  It's item #11 on
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Linux_PR/newlug.html :


11. Design your Web page to be forgiving of deferred maintenance.

Much as we'd like our LUGs' "upcoming events" and other time-sensitive
information to be always current, it isn't going to happen: Sometimes,
you don't re-check and update them for a week or two. Therefore, always
list _several_ months' upcoming events. (You know when they'll be because
you have a meeting-date formula, right?) That way, when you're
unavailable for Web-page maintenance for two months running, the Web
page will still include current meeting information.

Somehow, my local LUGs' webmasters seem resistant to that simple idea,
with the result that most list only one upcoming meeting at a time,
which, for three quarters of the month, because of the inevitable
deferred maintenance, ends up being last month's date.

The whole point of listing specific upcoming meeting dates is to make it
unnecessary for casual visitors to work out when the next (say) 2nd
Tuesday will be, by doing it for them. But that effort is wasted when
the only meetings shown are already past: It makes new LUG members that
much less likely, and additionally may lead some to think your LUG is
now defunct.