Technology Bytes

This week’s event calendar kicks off Thursday night with the 1960 PC Users Group. Their monthly Graphics Special Interest Group meets Thursday, July 20th, at the Cypress Creek Christian Church and Community Center, located at 6823 Cypresswood Drive in Spring, Texas. The second floor annex building is where you want to be from seven to nine PM. July’s meeting will revisit some of the basic operations in Paint Shop Pro, concentrating again on “graphics from scratch” as opposed to photo editing. Alex Dumestre will be your SIG Leader, walking you through the training aids provided by Paint Shop Pro, with a look at some of the various tutorials available online.

Time will also be spent looking at the powerful customization capabilities of Paint Shop Pro so that you can tailor it to be as convenient as possible for the routine tasks that you do. Alex will also have a short show and tell of a restoration that he did on a cracked and faded precious photo from the ealry 1950s. Things will wrap up with a look at the new
Google program called SketchUp, a 3D modeling program that, among other things, allows you to embed 3D buildings in Google Earth. It’s
important to note that the basic version of this program is free. Even if you don’t attend the meeting, you might want to take a peek at this 3D design software.

This Saturday is the fourth Saturday of the month, meaning that it is time for the Houston Linux Users Group second general meeting of July. No specific topic has yet graced the front page of www.hlug.org, but check back there between now and Saturday for meeting details. Things kick off at two in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located a half mile or so from MicroCenter near the Houston Galleria. A short break takes place at three, and things are wrapped up by four.

And…on this day in 1935 the first automatic parking meter in the U.S., the Park-O-Meter, invented by Carlton Magee, was installed in Oklahoma City by the Dual Parking Meter Company. Twenty-foot spaces were painted on the pavement, and a parking meter that accepted nickels was planted in the concrete at the head of each space. The city paid for the meters with the funds collected from them. Today, parking meters are big business.
Companies offer digital parking meters, smart parking meters, and, more remarkably, user-friendly parking meters. The user-friendly parking meters are an attempt to stem the tide of “violent confrontations” between users and their meters.

The tie-in to local events?

This summer, Houston will become the first major U.S. city to manage its parking meters over a wireless network. This according to Houston CIO Richard Lewis. Knowing how things go with the city, however, I wouldn’t hold my breath until the first Wi-Fi enabled meter is turned on.

That’s that for your Paint Shop Pre-Alert and that’s that for BarretTime.