On Tue, Nov 28, 2023 at 03:51:59PM +0000, Allan Heim wrote:
A Starbucks near me (in Nevada, alas) has an alcove with a long conference table and chairs. Perhaps someone has seen a similar arrangement somewhere in Sacramento? Chocolate Fish near the Crocker Gallery? That reminds me: the North Bay LUG used to have its meetings at the offices of O'Reilly Media in Sebastopol. Later, they moved to Sonic's offices in Santa Rosa. Maybe there's a tech company or ISP that would be into hosting Saclug? Brian, is Lugod still a thing, or is it moribund? I miss chillin' with fellow geeks!
Back when I was still down in California, LUGOD was meeting regularly at either the public library, or Explorit Science Center (a classroom there).
I think we ended up switching back and forth a lot because LUGOD's general meetings were on Mondays at that point (social gatherings on Tuesdays), and therefore landed on a lot of holidays. (Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968) IIRC, they stopped allowing groups to meet after hours, and thus could no longer meet there on holidays, or keep going after 9pm closure on non-holidays. Hence, bouncing back and forth between there & Explorit.
Also, you couldn't book the library more than 3 months in advance, and someone would have to stay on top of things or another group would swipe the room out from under us. :-D So, while it was free and convenient and comfortable (and had lots of curious passers-by peeking in and maybe joining us), there was a "cost": constantly having to keep on top of things, and eventually that locale bouncing. :-|
As for LUGOD these days, the previous president, Timothy Thatcher, ended up moving out of state as well. No one has stepped up to take over running the group, and sadly it looks like the last official meeting was just prior to the pandemic (late 2019). They have a Discord (and I think still an IRC channel, plus the mailing lists, which are probably in need of some modernization [*]) if anyone wants to hop over and try to breathe some life in the group!
[*] I recall when a ton of ucdavis dot edu email addresses got auto unsubscribed due to some new configuration requirement that's way beyond my understanding. Gmail addresses too, I think? Basically, a lot of folks who used to be on 'vox' and 'vox-tech' and so on got dropped, and probably didn't even realize. <anguish>