Meeting: An Evening of Festive Fun
WROCC brought 2012 to a close with an evening of festive nibbles and entertainment. A selection of humorous photographs and video clips were curated by Chris Hughes, Terry Marsh, Steve Potts and Rick Sterry, while Peter Richmond taxed the grey matter with thirty fiendish quiz questions about Acorn and RISC OS past and present.
Report by Rick Sterry
Once again, we devoted the December meeting to more frivolous activities, including the showing of some amusing images and videos. Mince pies, Stollen, Genoa cake and shortbread biscuits were available for those who were not too worried about the calorie count.
The highlight of the evening was Peter Richmond’s fiendish computer-related quiz, with some relatively easy questions and a few really tough and/or obscure ones. We divided into five teams of three people each to answer 30 questions, with a possible total score of 34 points. The winning team with an impressive 33 points was ‘Clueless’, comprising Steve Fryatt, Dave Barrass and myself. I unwittingly gave away the answer to the first question to the other teams (how embarrassing), but fortunately this made no difference to the order of team scores. The runners-up were ‘The Wakers’ with a very respectable 28 points, followed by ‘Hard Times’ with 22 points, ‘Amazement’ with 15 points, and bottom of the pile was ‘Vista Devils’ with a score of 13 – still not at all bad. There was no prize for the winning team, but hey, we’re British and it’s all about the taking part.
If you would like to find some of the images and video clips for yourself, search for the following on YouTube and other video sites: “Medieval helpdesk (with English subtitles)”, “Amazon Mother’s Day Commercial” (slightly risqué), and “Bernard – I love sky”. One video of a stunt plane breaking a wing off and yet still landing safely was, as we suspected at the time, a hoax, seemingly part of a clandestine advertising campaign for a German clothing company – “One wing plane Landing” will find it on YouTube. Another amusing item consisted of a series of photos of the very interesting green ‘instructional’ livery on a Kulula Airlines Boeing 737-800 – just Google for “Flying 101”.
The meeting was to have included the debut of our new Optoma HD230X HDMI-enabled video projector, which was purchased earlier on in the day. Unfortunately, it was found to be suffering from a fault which caused a rather curious vertical double-ruling effect to appear on the screen, regardless of the source and screen resolution. This was picked up during testing prior to the meeting, but as no further units were in stock at the supplier it had to be returned for refund. The existing projector served us well enough at the meeting, and as we do not need one at the AGM, the intention now is to purchase a working example of the Optoma in time for the February meeting, which will be all about tablet computers.
