Meetings

May 3, 2003

Transcribed: May 18, 2003
To: The crew of the USS Tikopai NCC-1800, R4, Starfleet
Subject: Minutes for the May meeting on 3 May 2003
From: John May, Commanding Officer, USS Tikopai NCC-1800

Hello shipmates,

I can see that I didn’t get the word out that the May meeting was at Bruce’s place. I’ll do better. Please let me say now, if we haven’t made the point already, the website should contain all the latest info on our activities. I asked Bruce to post upcoming events. If there are things coming up that you think should get on there, wire Bruce.
The meeting only had four people there, and I was glad to see Mike (J. Edward Dick) Miyagi there. Bruce was a great host. Suzanne Early also showed up and I was glad she did after she told us that she has been accepted by the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She’s leaving us, but hopefully, she, like other crew members, will only be “relocated” and will stay in touch via the member talk net. I think we all wish her well and great success.
There were only a few items that I covered, and the first was dealt with the issue of scholarships. When I brought the matter up, Susanna told us she had looked up the site and made an application for the James Doohan/ Montgomery Scott Engineering Scholarship. She said that she could get academic references and transcripts like Starfleet asked for, but she had some trepidation about stating what she has done in Starfleet because she has only briefly been a member. The rest of us thought that what she was doing at NASA and with the Mars Society was probably more in line with Roddenberry’s dream than what a lot of us Feddies are doing now.
The second item of business concerned the challenge issued to Region 4 by George Clark of the Defiant up in Sacramento and Pete Briggs, formerly of the now decommissioned Simonov (USS Simonize) who decided to sample the glorious life of a Klingon (Sorry, gang. No Klingon jokes). This takes place at 9:00 AM on the 17th at the Laser Tag in Carmichael at 601 Fair Oaks Blvd. It would be great if we could give them a repeat of our last laser-tag victory. The last time the Tikopoai participated in a laser-tag match, we won. Would we do it again?
I also commented that we needed to pass out the fliers for the food drive that weekend so we would be ready for the canned food drive on the 8th of June. We would need a minimum of six people to meet at Bruce’s house about 1300 to canvas the neighborhood.
I presented Eric’s appeal for support for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence that works out of Cal at Berkeley. And I said I thought it is a very worthwhile project for other people in the ship to support. It’s not really a demand on our time or our resources because the program runs in the background while you’re idle at the keyboard, or away to grab a Coke. We would also make a contribution.

Who knows what they’ll find out there? Astronomers and cosmologists are pushing back to the very edge of the known universe: 15 billion light years away. There are great mysteries appearing in the cosmos that challenge scientists’ very basic beliefs about the nature of creation and the shape of space! You and I have a chance to take part in great discoveries, and isn’t that a part of Trek? I urge everybody to go to the SETI site and check it out.

I raised the business of the upcoming Bay Con and the recruiting table the Tikopai will have in the Con’s fan table alley. I called for volunteers to man the table and reach out for new people to join us in the Tikopai. Bruce excused himself in lieu of his operation coming up, and Susanna and Mike said they were going to Kublai Con which will be on the same weekend at the Hyatt Regency, 1333 Bayshore Highway in Burlingame.
Bruce said that he was busy preparing HTML routines for the Starfleet Marines International website. The good news that he had to share with us was his promotion to Brigadier General.
We discussed the meeting situation. I explained the reason we were changing the day of the meeting although not the venue. The tropical fish owners’ society planned to pack the Round Table Pizza on the first and second weekends so we took the one that wasn’t booked: the fourth Saturday. This would mean that we wouldn’t have a meeting until June 28, which we scheduled last month for the Tikopai’s 15th anniversary. I told the meeting that Linda Bimson would be working with Felicia Kirton Houser to plan the party.
Susanne Early shared her pictures of the week she spent at the Mars Society’s camp in Utah. She told us of the camp’s attempt to simulate living experience on the planet Mars. The team that she worked with at NASA wrote some of the software the camp was using in one of its experiments and Susanna had a chance to help out. She showed how the camp was totally remote from civilization except for emergencies should someone need to be evacuated to a hospital. They used 4-wheel all terrain vehicles to simulated Mars Rovers, and Susanna checked out on them. The one thing she said that distressed her was the camp’s notion of “composting” which she recognized would never become anything except a pile of garbage because it didn’t have the correct ratio of brown to green organics. This was because there were no organics, green or brown, where she was. One would hope the scientists at the Mars Society camp really know their science because Susanna can tell you that they don’t know…compost.
Susanna and Mike brought a variety of board games to show, and we can see that they are very much into board games. The meeting adjourned and Susanna, Mike and Bruce stayed afterwards to play a popular board game that Mike brought.

Signed and respectfully submitted,
CDR John May
Commanding Officer, USS Tikopai NCC-1800