Plano Early Lions Roar!

Lion Don Johnson’s mother passed away this week. Please take a bit of time in the coming week to include Lion Don’s family in your thoughts and prayers.

Good to see some participation from the other club members. Please have patience with me while I work out some of the details. One of the things some of you have run into already is that I have set the comments for moderation. The first comment that you enter will be ‘moderated’, so that I can make sure that you are really a member of the club, and not a forum-spammer. After that, the system is supposed to let you post comments without me having to approve them. Let me know if that is not the case!

By the way, anybody that wants author/edit privileges, and is willing to make an occasional post, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to set you up.

Lion Mike Marvel (whom I have mentioned before) gave me a call today, and did me the favor of pointing out a couple of typos on the website. Lion Mike is completely blind — and one of the typos that he found wasn’t even in a part of the site that is normally visible. He uses a program called “Jaws” that reads websites (and other documents) to him, and it picked up on the alternate text for the Lions International logo, which I had typo’d.

So a Lion who is completely blind read our website more thoroughly than the normally-sighted members who have skimmed over it. Ok, as I have put on the front page, you guys have until the first meeting in April 2008 to figure out how to comment on this blog, or get tail-twisted for it every meeting until you do figure it out. Enough of begging for participation; it’s gonna cost you not to, starting in April.

The reason Lion Mike called is that he is working on a website for his club, and he plans to put in a link to us. I have offered to host his club’s site for $12/year (which is a good deal cheaper than the hosting company that they were considering), as long as I didn’t have to do any of the website work. I should mention that I will make the same offer to any other Lions club in District 2X-1. I have enough surplus bandwidth that I should be able to handle 10 to 15 club websites. I currently donate hosting to the Plano Early Lions Club, and any fees I get for hosting other Lions Club sites will go to the PELC Administrative account.

A group of us went to Texarkana last year for the Bulldog 100 — and had a great time. We’re going again this year, and with what we’ve learned from out experience last year, we should be in a good position to recruit some racers for the Plano 5.0 (tentatively scheduled for November, but we’re still negotiating with the manager of the prospective site). So far the Lions that we know are planning to be there include me, Tom, and Gordon. We really need at least 10 members there. It’s the Thursday through Saturday after Memorial Day.

…Or as Lion Tom put it, the Phoenix Rising from the Ashes. We have a very promising lead on a site. The best part is that the site under consideration will greatly reduce our costs and the level of effort we will have to invest. If you want to learn more about this, you are just going to have to come to the BOD meeting on February 16th.

We got a really good presentation on HOBY today from Rich Honiball, who was himself a HOBY alumnus. I’m going to encourage the club to sponsor at least one student to this event this year.