January 13 (FRIDAY the 13th
– eek!) 2012
Welcome to Rochester's first snowstorm
of the year.
And welcome to the new RAMYA members:
Pete Royle
and
Kenny Fourspring;
As I sit here in the warmth of my
house, putting off running the snow blower, I will use my energy,
instead, on bringing y'all up to date about the RAMYA website.
Ramyasailing.com
Over the past two years Beth has put
lots of time and energy into shaping our website into a more
professional looking display of our club activities. First she bought
the web domain RAMYASAILING.COM and continues to pay for that
subscription. Next she rented website space and website editing
tools, to the tune of about $120 per year so that she could create
and host the new site. She did a terrific job not only with the
website creation but also gathered all of our unwritten rules and
regulations and created a formal set of by-laws.
(
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FmsGvRz92yIxBlKnNgjkA1v7sNqgenOg1Ywn_GchIMk/edit?hl=en&authkey=CLKf3YoN)
I especially appreciate her efforts
with the by-laws since it will make my job much easier. I expect that
most issues that arise in the next two years will be resolved by
someone just being able to refer the problem to a clause in the
by-laws – how much more civilized can you get than that, eh? The
most prominent feature of the by- laws, in my opinion is the
statement of the following phrases: “civility”, “fair play and
good fellowship”, “sportsmanship”, “fellowship and
camaraderie” and “spirit of fairness and cooperation”. I
believe that these phrases all spell out F U N ! I hope that everyone
agrees with me.
Okay, back to the topic of the website.
Since Beth has stepped down, I have
taken it upon myself to reduce her financial obligation by moving the
website to a non-cost service. First I moved it back to my RIT
domain. Then, to my amazement, I discovered that Google has changed
its free web sites from what they used to call Google Pages ( a VERY
low level service) to what they now call Google Sites. This service
is almost as capable as the service that Beth was paying for ( she
still pays for the domain name). So we now use Google Sites for our
web service.
One page that Beth instituted, RULES,
is a pretty good summary of the rules we follow locally. Many of you
have sent links to me suggesting that I post similar rules from other
clubs on our website. As I read through these they always include
some of their local rule interpretations that don't agree with the
practices within our club. Since there is so much interest in this, I
think it would be a good idea for those who are interested to step
forward and form a committee to arrive at a set of our local
interpretations of the rules that may be used as a firm set to be
enforced in RAMYA racing events.
The new structure of our website now
contains areas that allow some members to make direct content
contributions without going through me. So far we have RACING SCORES,
PICTURES, BLOGS, and CALENDAR. Beth and Jay now have access to those
features. Anyone else with a small amount of computer savvy can get
the passwords to those sections to do posting, there. Fleet captains,
please tell me what day of the week and time of the day you want your
competition to be held. Or you may post it yourself if you want by
getting the password from one of us to do that.
Oh yeah, while I am thinking about it,
I ask all of you to be sure that the date and time are set correctly
on your cameras. The reason for that is the program that files your
pictures on my computer uses the date to keep track of the pictures.
If the date is way off, the picture is essentially lost :( Some of
the pictures I have now from all of you have bad dates on them. Of
course you WIIL remember to make comments on all pictures –
pictures without comments are booorrriiinnnnggg.
And last but not least – If you
haven't paid your RAMYA dues yet please sent a check to Richard.
Walt