Apples & Oranges first meeting of the year

September 11th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in apples & oranges, blog |

Well, it’s that time of year again; time for me to be the big man and head up the Apples & Oranges group for GVSU. Apples & Oranges, in case you didn’t know, is the Apple User Group for Grand Valley which I am president of.

Last night we had our first meeting and it was pretty good. I bought some ice cream chips and pop and at about 8:45pm, I ended up at the meeting. The usual suspects (ie. Nick, Rob and Beckey) showed up with probably 10 more new people along with our advisor, Eric. Jeff, my house-mate was there for the free food and pop, and Dallas and Samantha showed up for a moment. From how I saw it, it was actually a pretty damn good turn out. I got e-mails from two or three other people who wanted to be there but were either busy or just forgot, so I see that as a good sign for next week’s meeting.

This week, I kind of stood around like a professor and tried to help people with their Apple issues by talking them through the process. We got onto som crazy topics like torrents, converting movies for your iPod and ripping music from your iPod (specifically the iPod Touch, ugh). Nick and Rob had comments here and there and by the end I was sitting down trying to fix Mail problems which sucked (I absolutely hate Mail).

Outside of having no structure and me not having my damn mini-DVI to VGA adapter to show people how to do things on the projector, it was a pretty good meeting. Next week I’ll have to take a more commanding lead and keep the discussions focused. We drifted a lot.. but I’m not going to go further than that. As I said, next week will have to be more focused.

I have plans to show off how to rip music off of your iPod (specifically the iTouch, but also any other iPod) as well as maybe showing how to transfer your iTunes library. Nick wanted to show off Transmission and how to use BitTorrent so we may have 2 mini-meetings going on. After next week I want to definitely show people how to use Handbrake and iSquint, then maybe one day I’ll show off the greatness that is Quicksilver. All in good time though.

Here’s to hoping next week is just as successful as this week.