Welcome back!  We hope everyone had a relaxing summer vacation and are looking forward to a successful semester.

Officers Present

Cardi DeMonaco (President), Anthony Wesley (Vice President), Pablo Garcia (Treasurer), Scott Hoffman (Secretary)

ACM Programming Competition

The regional ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest is scheduled to take place on Saturday, November 1, 2008.  Our region’s contest will be held at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor campus.  The University of Michigan-Dearborn enters two teams, with three students per team.

Members present nominated the following people for the teams (in no particular order): Cardi DeMonaco, Scott Hoffman, Vince Shaw, Trevor Tabaka, Bryan, Andrew Hagen, Mark McKenzie, Justin Seymour, Joe Lukas, Brandon Holbert, Pablo Garcia.

If you are interested in participating in the contest, please contact Dr. Elenbogen as soon as possible.

IBM Master the Mainframe Competition

Dr. Elenbogen encourages all members to participate in this competition about IBM mainframes.  The contest begins on October 1.  You can work by yourself and at your own pace; the only deadline is December 29.

T-Shirts

We are again going to try to get t-shirts made.  Please submit your ideas to Cardi as soon as possible.

Flyers/Brochures

Cardi proposed we create informational brochures about computing topics that we can distribute around the campus.  Some ideas are:

• How to use Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, or Gmail to check all of your email accounts at once.
• Speed up your computer by disabling start-up items with MSConfig, deleting temporary files, defragmenting your hard drive, etc.
• Free or open source software alternatives to major proprietary programs such as Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Gimp, etc.

Events

We would like to run a gaming day event for all students to attend.  The event will likely be held in Kochoff Hall in late October or November, and have new and old games like Super Smash Brothers, Halo, NES games, and others.  If you have an ideas, please contact Cardi.

ACM National Membership

Although you do not have to be a member of ACM national to participate in the local chapter activities, the officers highly recommend you join.  The national student membership only costs $19 per year and grants you access to ACM’s digital library, e-books, publications, a mentoring program, and more.  Visit acm.org to join.

The next meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 30, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. in the CIS building conference room.