Hello everyone. Well, I must say that I'm in rather a bad frame of mind right now. Between news that the CC are putting up further strange obstacles to JK's work ('adequate virus protection'? Sheesh) on the techie side of things, and all this bad blood on the personal side, it's hard to stay enthusiastic about MiNDS. No point in my moping, however - back to business! First of all, I'd like to address the tone of this list of late. People have been arguing heatedly with very little reason. We all care about MiNDS, we all are doing our best to make sure that we can make it a viable society once again, and unfortunately people are getting very emotional. We've got to remember that we're working towards the same goal. Please try to be a little calmer when reading mails on the list. If something really annoys you, try to remember not to respond immediately. And when you do respond, try to be businesslike about it. It's easy to ignore things that bother you. While we do all have personalities, perhaps cut down on comments that you personally think are funny. The text medium makes it very easy to misinterpret humour. Secondly, the issue of who goes to the meeting. It's obvious that the chair should go. I think it's fair to say that the VC should go too; it's very apparent that Siobhan does want to be there, and there is little to choose between our VC and our PRO going. The Computer Centre are unlikely to even bat an eyelid at our choice, so it really isn't as big a deal as we're all making out. People also seem to be of the opinion that I should go. While I do want to be there, keep in mind that I'm not even on the committee, nor was I a student this year. Thirdly, I have some questions which I think we've all forgotten about. What is the agenda at this meeting? Are we instigating it? Have we let the CC know what we want to talk about? When is it going to be? What should we bring/not bring to the table? Is anything actually up for discussion here, or are we going to sit opposite them and try to think of what to say? What happened to the documents we put together earlier in the year? It might be worth forwarding my policy documents to JK - he might be able to use some of the work I did on those. So. Let's try to keep our goal in sight: MiNDS, up and running as an entity approved by the college, in whatever form that eventually is. It may take a long time and many administrations before we have what we would term a reasonable level of access, but we've got to work with what we have. Some is better than none. And while we may not all be friends, let's try to keep this professional. Cian -- "There's one thing that computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering *everything*. Being able to *find* things is what's important." - Dan, Microserfs