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Phil’s Ramblings
est wishes for a happy,
B healthy 2017! I hope
everyone had a joyous holiday season
with family and friends!
LCACE members who attended our
rd
Holiday Party on December 3 got their
holiday season off to a good start. We
had a great mix of members from the old Atari
days all the way up to new members who
joined during the past year – and one, Cheryl
Nickels, who joined at the party! In total, about
35 attendees.
I would like to again recognize Bill Fosdick for
selling the most tickets for the major raffle (200)
and J. J. Johnson for selling the winning ticket.
Of special note, the two top prizes in our major
raffle were won by “outsiders”, i.e., individuals
who are not members of our club. In the past,
some LCACE members have had difficulty in
selling tickets at work or in other environments
outside our club because of the perception that
raffle prizes are typically won by club members.
Looking forward, the results of this year’s raffle
should give us a good selling point as we ap-
proach non-members in the future and ask for
their support.
Party attendees were very generous in support-
ing our 50/50 raffle; purchasing $225 worth of
tickets. Linda Busch was the winner, going
home with $112.50. Our club was also a win-
ner, adding $112.50 to our treasury.
The ugly sweater contest was back again this
year, with four contestants. The winter for
“Ugliest Sweater” was Robin Seidenberg; the
winner for “Most Creative” was DeBorah Sirilla.
Thanks to our contestants, and our judges!
3
Looking forward, there do not ap-
pear to be any dramatic changes
on the horizon with regards to oper-
ating systems, applications, securi-
ty or hardware. However, there are
a number of incremental changes in
the works, which are well worth
keeping track of.
One of these has been underway
for approximately six months.
Google announced in June that it is working
to integrate Android apps into its Chrome op-
erating system. (The Chrome OS is used on
Chromebooks; until now the only source of
apps for this operating system was the
Chrome Web Store, which contains a rela-
tively small number of basic applications.)
Google began the rollout of this initiative by
selecting three specific Chromebook models
for an Android beta test, with the promise
that many other existing Chromebook models
would be eligible for this upgrade later in
2016.
Unfortunately, this transition seems to be
progressing more slowly than was originally
promised. Even though 2016 is almost over, I
have not seen any announcement from
Google that the promised upgrade for the
designated Chromebooks will be available
anytime soon. Here is a link to a recent arti-
cle assessing this transition:
http://www.cio.com/article/3150671/
chrome-os/android-apps-on-
chromebook-arent-ready-for-prime-
time.html
When this initiative was first announced,
there was some speculation in the technolo-
gy press that this would enable Chrome-
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