Fairlight-CMI

Colin,

Two items:

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I would like to provide my support for your Annual Fairlight Meeting.
However, I am offering my location for those who cannot make the trip to
England! We could have simultaneous meetings here and in England, with
trans-Atlantic communication via phone and Internet throughout the day.

I am located in Canada near Niagara Falls, not far from the US-Canada
border. My house is 'in the country' on 5 acres of land. I have plenty
of room for guests (and parking), with many hotel and motel rooms
nearby at various price points (since this is a tourist area). I can
even put up several quests at my house, and arrange transportation to
and from nearby Buffalo or Toronto airports.

Of course, I will have my Series II there (which I have had for 20
years), with other machines possibly coming from Toronto.

The only dates that are not available for me are March 31 to April 4,
and a week each side of those dates. This is the time of the Frankfurt
Musikmesse, which I expect to be attending in my role as the BassLab
distributor for North America.

I hope that you will give this proposal some consideration, and I look
forward to your reply.

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I appreciate and admire the effort that you are putting into the
Fairlight community. The comment on my Message Board page about
"intrusive advertising and user-tracking at Yahoo Groups" was not
directed at your efforts, but at Yahoo Groups itself.

The e-mailed forum messages contain advertising, and, after looking into
it further, I found that Yahoo also inserts what they call "web beacons"
into the e-mails that are sent to members of your group. These beacons
are small "invisible" GIF images with parameters, so that Yahoo knows
who is reading the mail and when... Yahoo also tracks this information
to create an aggregate "profile" of each of your members that they claim
is for target advertising.

Personally, I am strongly against this sort of intrusion. That's one
reason why I have maintained an "arm's length" approach to my Fairlight
pages, both the Message Board and the Swap Shop.

What I propose is this: Why don't we work together and move your Yahoo
features over to my site, where there would be no commercial intrusions
or violations of privacy? You can still act as moderater and a kind of
"super-user" to create new surveys, databases, etc.

I am an experienced database and Web programmer, and can provide the
technical structure to support all of the features. Security is also a
given, since I do secure e-commerce sites also. We could even set up a
separate domain.

The features could be both private and public. For example, the
"Fairlight Owners Registry Database" could have both a "members-only"
view (with details) and a "public" view that lists only serial number,
date sold, and city/country. We could even start with the original
factory sales lists (from Peter Wielk and info that I can get a hold
of), and allow owners to search for their serial numbers, to build an
"ownership trail" for each instrument.

In summary, I think that Yahoo is not the appropriate platform for
delivery of these features. I hope that you and I can work together for
the benefit of the Fairlight community.

Thank you.

-- 
Greg Holmes
mailto:gregh@ghservices.com
GH Services, Ontario, Canada
--
http://www.ghservices.com/
http://www.ghservices.com/gregh/fairligh/         (Fairlight CMI)


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