Apr. 14th, 2015 Theme: Every Day Has A History

“Nobody else feels the same way about your dog as you do.” ~~ Daniel Clowes, Author of Ghost World, born April 14, 1961

Welcome to the pre-taxing April meeting blog. Today, we had 1 young guest with us.  

Jim was our toastmaster and conducted a lively and fast-moving meeting.  He talked about the 217 citings of April 14 events throughout the centuries. For examples, the first dictionary was published in 1828 by Daniel Webster; Apple’s Lawsuit against Microsoft for Graphical User Interface infringement was thrown out in 1992; and 99% of the human genome completed being sequenced in 2003.

The GATE  team was: Chizuko as Grammarian (Account), Jean as the Ah Counter, Alice as the Timer and Pauline as the General Evaluator.     

Lynne was our first speaker of the afternoon. She completed her 1^st speech from the High Performance Leadership Manual (The Vision) in 7:01 minutes. Her speech title was "The Bigger Picture".

Lynne has chosen a high performance project as Chairperson to oversee and coordinate the 13^th Annual Celebration of Opening Day by multiple Yacht Clubs including her own. This will occur on May 2, 2015, starting at 10AM (to 5PM) at the Dock below Anthony’s Restaurant in Everett. Celebrating the Seahawks will be the theme. A decorated boat/water parade round-trip between Everett and Mukilteo will occur. There will be food and an awards ceremony.

Lynne’s task is to encourage other competent, able people (especially owners of boats) to be chairpersons of various subcommittees and to sign up volunteers to populate these subcommittees.

With all these activities, (like plates on vertical sticks, in circles, spinning!) Lynne is determined to have fun, be grateful and flexible.

  Robert was her evaluator. Robert liked the ease in which she explained her leadership role elements, instantly assigned Pauline to be the person responsible (for a few moments). Lynne offered the Flyer for the event and passed around large pictures of previous celebrations. Her repeated interaction with the audience, Body language, joyful energy, positive movement throughout the speaking area all formed parts of an effective speech.

Lynne and Robert were voted best in their respective roles.

Our second speaker, Sue, completed her 2^nd project (Organize Your Speech) from the Competent Communicators Manual , which was called: In The Cloud, What Does That Mean? in 6:24 minutes.

She talked about a training class in SQL Server Azure that she attended, where she was introduced to concepts such as cloud (computing), which lets people or companies use remote (to them), centralized applications and databases via a Web Browser. These people or companies may use large amounts of disk storage space or large numbers of transactions with a populated database, for which they might pay much money in exchange if the cloud owner is a large company like Amazon, Apple or Microsoft.

Sometimes these Applications and databases are realized by Virtual Machines which simulate physical computer operating systems and are housed in huge computer servers. This permits the cloud administrator to scale the computer demand with great flexibility.

Sue indicated several issues with cloud computing: Users are at the mercy of mandatory updates for all, even if they don’t want anything to change; Cloud services are available all the time, except when they are not. 

Sue discussed in her speech a sophisticated level of modern day computing architectures.

  Linda was her evaluator. Linda liked that Sue started with a humorous story of her training class at the beginning of her speech. Sue’s body language when depicting the “cloud” while looking down was an excellent visual. Due to the technical nature of the talk, a white board with the written names and acronyms would be a helpful supplement. Linda liked the benefits and issues involved with cloud computing. To relate the audience’s experience with the cloud, Linda suggested asking that Sue ask the audience about who uses Google Drive [or Microsoft Office 365 or Web based Mail -- me.]  Summarizing the most important points in a louder voice was also suggested.

  Our third speaker, Naser, offered a refined version of his contest speech in 6:53 minutes. Naser, as winner of the Area 54 contest last month, is competing on April 17, 2015 at the Division E Contest in Kirkland.

Round robin comments were offered to Naser, which admired the many improvements made to the speech “What Does Great Mean?”

See the March 10th and February 24th Blog posts for more information about the content of this speech.

  Amritha was the humorist for this day. She told a story about a long married couple. The wife kept a shoebox in the closet whose contents were forbidden to the husband to be opened and viewed. When the wife becomes seriously ill, the secret box is opened in her presence and the husband totally misconstrues the implications of the contents.

  Pauline was the General Evaluator today.  She liked the smoothness with which Alice replaced Grace (absent) as timer. Pauline wished that a short table topics section could be fit into the meetings, even with 3 speakers on the agenda. She thought that Linda as evaluator, could speak in a stronger voice. She also suggested that Robert get up prior to being introduced to streamline the Evaluation section.

  Two of our members received certificates for their endeavors. Diana received the Icebreaker Award for her first speech. Jim received his Competent Leadership Award for Completing the required roles in the Competent Leadership Manual.

Attendees were:  Linda, Jean, Jim, Robert, Barb, Dave P., Preston, Lynne, Jessica, Naser, Kathy, Alice, Amritha, Anisha, Chizuko, Sue, Pauline, Diana, as well as our young guest: Ivan H. pictured above. Our membership total remains at 27.

~~~~~ Respectfully Submitted by Robert, the Secretary [Come on and comment] ~~~~~