Tonights meeting and state of the club

[Brad A.]

I think tonight was our largest gathering in the history of VMA!

It was fun to talk to fellow hobbyist and see everybody again.

A few of us were talking about starting a membership list of e-mails, as this would be one step closer to organizing the club.

Drew has decided to go the way of freshwater and now we are without a leader. So, I have a couple of ideas for everyone to consider.

1. I dont think we need a "president" at this time.

2. Eric volunteered to be the keeper of the membership list.

3. Nolo has made a sweet website for us. Is there anyway we can utilize it more than we are at this time?

4. What do you think about continuing to have the meetings at club members houses for now? I think its a good idea to see other tanks etc.. However, every once in a while we can have a "presentation" or a more formal meeting at a desinated location.

5. Continue to post signs at Pet advant and MMR directing people to this Forum as well as asking for their e-mail address.

I'll volunteer to have the March meeting at my place. If people are interested, it would be fun to have the group purchase a large coral and frag it for a meeting. I have a dremel and we could go to town on it. We could also get a softie and cut it up and demonstrate how to sew or mount softies as well.

Enough chatter

[nolofinwe]

well I, for one, made out like a bandit. Litterally, in one circumstance (what do you mean I can't take all the frags?).

Tank looks much more full now with the new pieces stuck everywhere and the new clam, much thanks to everybody.

I think the forum serves our functional purposes pretty well, as far as internet capabilities are concerned. I think we should just downgrade the VMA site I built to a static page that just allows people to contact us, read our mission statement (whatever it is), and maybe a page with the most recent news on it.

We should probably register a domain name for it too. vma.nolofinwe.com just dosent sound as cool as www.vtmarine.com

(www.vma.com -net-us-info-org are taken.)

[SHOmuchFUN]

Originally posted by nolofinwe
well I, for one, made out like a bandit. Litterally, in one circumstance (what do you mean I can't take all the frags?).



:lol:

Nolo, that was some funny ****, when Tom Berry asked for a piece of that yellow porities (one that he originally gave me, mind you) and I told him there was a piece in the cooler. He opened the cooler and said "THEY'RE ALL GONE!" :lol:

No problem on the frags bro, just wanted to make sure everyone got what they wanted! Post some pics of your pieces when you get a chance. Hopefully everything rocovers nicely, that robusta is a sweet coral.

Anyway... For the club.
I volunteered to take on the President's duties without the president title. I'm on this darn thing all the time anyway and I'm at the computer at work 40 hours a week. I have a lot of capabilities at my disposal and it seems I have more time than many others (I don't know if that's pathetic or not). I wouldn't mind being responsible for what happens in the club, but I do need help, as I'm a bit of a remote resource being in Montpelier and all.

I agree that much of the fun of the club is to gloat about your tank to others interested in it. I too have drewled over everyone's tank at one time or another. I owe much of my bankrupt-ness to many current members :cough, Tom, Tom, Brad, etc.: But I also attribute much of my success to them as well. I believe that to spark the interest, there has to be some inspiration. I believe that seeing a beautiful reef tank that someone has created themself, is a divine piece of inspiration.

I liked meeting at MMR, but did think it was a bit intimidating for the "newbie" crowd. We all had our cliques that would chat amongst eachother. I did meet Ken, which was nice, but there were others that I didn't get to meet. I think that we can have a formal question and answer, a get-to-know forum, etc. etc. in upcoming meetings to create a more comfortable atmosphere to some of the newer members of the group.

Lets try, for the next meeting, to create a more structured informal meeting. I think Bruce did a great job at creating a space where we could meet in the future and he deserves some thanks. Hopefully we can only grow from here and create a solid network of reefers, willing to help eachother out. I remember the days when Tom Preska handed me a frag of Green Star Polyps and thought I got the greatest deal on the planet! Pulsing Xenia was next and I couldn't wipe the grin off my face. I think it's great that we're trading acro and porities frags amongs eachother now, I'm just glad to give back to what was once given to me when my tank finished cycling....

Anyway, enough reminiscing.
Let's keep the train rolling on this. We can make it work.

-Erik

[SHOmuchFUN]

BTW... The clowns I got are DEFINITELY saddlebacks. They are already hosting in my carpet anemone. Went straight for it and seem to be spending the night there... Here's a pic of an ID of a black variant of the A. polymnus (saddleback):

http://home.ripway.com/2003-10/32128/AMPHIPRIONPOLYMNUS.jpg

This is the link to the ID gallery:
http://archive.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=305127

[tsalter]

I think we do need to get nolo some money for a domain name. Then possibly a BB or something to make it more useful. I haven't been to the club site in ages because there is no reason to go there. if we had a discussion board there I think I would use it more. If a bb would be too much then downgrading to a static page would be cool. It just wouldn't give old members much reason to go there.

March meeting sounds good Brad. I will host feb or january. Will give me a reason to fix my tank up.


Erik,
I think gloat was too strong a word. But I understand exactly what you mean. It is fun to talk about your tank and what is going on. But I also think as a club we have to have a focus on the whole as well just our own systems. Which I think we do okay but it just goes to the comment about making meetings newbe frendly. No one likes to be told what to do with their tank. We can only offer well we did this and it works and let them draw conclusions. Experience is the best teacher in reefkeeping.


Tom

[nolofinwe]

I wouldn't worry about getting me money, I can register a domain name for about three bucks.

I think sticking to using reef centrals forum would be fine, if not optimal, as it's already connected to a very popular database. I don't think there is any sense in fragmenting our discussions.

I can host the vma site, and it's not going to cost us anything, we might as well just make it a compelling resource for new members.

By the way, we can help our google ranking if everyone that dosent already link to VMA in their 'homepage' link on RC would do so.

I should probably write up some meta tags as well...

[tsalter]

I think the RC forum is fine as well. Can we get a sticky on the forum to our website?

I agree with Brad that we don't need a President. As we are for the most part pretty informal and I can't see much beneifit in becoming a much more formal club. I think what we do now suits for the most part the needs of our members.

If Eric gathers an email list of all the members that would be cool. We can keep each other updated of stuff there as well as here on the boards.

I think we do need to define the focus/role of the club?

Is it to get together and talk about our tanks and related stuff.
Make group buys and help each other out?

Is there a need to have a group anything in this hobby? Most everything that we need we would have to use all the time right? If you had a car club you could jointly purchase a alignment rack or tools that all could share. But here we don't really have objects that can be loaned out for a short period of time.

Is there a need to formally "educate" club members about reefkeeping? There is so much information on the boards and so many different perceptions/bias on what works for people that I find it almost impossible to make any sense out of what most anyone says on RC. Should we make/post on our website a club document that says well for a basic softy tank you should have this, For an sps tank, you should have this to start and these are the beneifits of this piece of equiptment. Let people make there own decisions on what they need.

I think we should define a frequency that we want to meet. If it happens once a month What happens when nobody is hosting? Where do we go for a meeting. who is in charge of making sure that a meeting goes on.

Also how we publicize to get new members. continuous flyers at local pets stores would work that have our web address so they can see the location of our next meeting.

Then as erik said a check in at the beginning who's here, new member check in. I don't know about a formal Q&A but we should have some sort of basic setup of a meeting. if it is only see who's here and say what kind of tank we have if there are new members. Then food and talk.


What do ya'll think?

T

[Brad A.]

one purpose of the "club" can be to promote the hobby and help people to be successful at reefkeeping. We could dedicate a small amount of time in the beginning of the meeting to discuss problems people are having...for example...we could brainstorm as to why some is having algae problems or whatever..

We havent had too many problems having people volunteer to host meetings.

Continuous flyers and word of mouth will get us new members. We just need to keep track of them..

[tsalter]

Cool,

We haven't had much problems with people hosting but we can go two months or so without a meeting at times. It probably would help for new members or those who aren't on rc all the time to have meeting location setup more in advance like a three month sign up so now we would be looking for someone to host in april. So that there would be some lead time for people. We could post the next three moth meeting schudule on the club site so that people can see if the meeting is close to them or whatever.

T

[SHOmuchFUN]

Good ideas...

If people can start posting their E-mails here, or PM them to me, I will keep track of them and start creating a list. I can start a new thread if need be.

Also enclose if you are willing to host a meeting at your place. That way can there can be a general rotation of tanks that we see.

[tsalter]

So should next months meeting be a steering meeting where we can get together and talk about the runnings of the club?

[Brad A.]

Sounds good except people should PM their E-mails cuz data miners will extract your e-mail and you'll get extra-SPAMED!

Just an idea for consideration- have a club steering meeting (briefly) at the time we advertise a big meeting, so that we have a lot of people present. So, perhaps when we have the Reefkeeping 101 presentation??

[Tom Berry]

Getting the domain name is a great idea. I think Patrick is right, a static page, with a prominent link directing people to this forum for latest news, meetings etc., would work well. Then we can put an easy to remember web address on all our promotional material. Right now, it is hard to explain to people how to get to this forum.

Tom:fish2:

[SHOmuchFUN]

Originally posted by Tom Berry
Getting the domain name is a great idea. I think Patrick is right, a static page, with a prominent link directing people to this forum for latest news, meetings etc., would work well. Then we can put an easy to remember web address on all our promotional material. Right now, it is hard to explain to people how to get to this forum.

Tom:fish2:

Couldn't agree more...

You can't put a static link on the flyers because the link to our forum is long and confusing... www.vermontmarine.com, or etc. is much easier to write down ;-)

[nolofinwe]

ok, I'll have some time tonight to redo the navigation on the site. I'll make the forum button bigger and add a few redundant links to it.

Member pages will be coming down along with the "lending" page.

[tsalter]

I still think it would be good to list our meeting schedule on the site if we had it planned in advance. So maybe a second page or some where on the first where we could put up

Something like this

http://www.ckayak.com/activities.asp

[nolofinwe]

completely off-topic:

I think somebody should go buy the sunspot anthias at the disadvantage. Great fish, needs a better home than PA.

[SHOmuchFUN]

I saw that one, they were asking a bit too much for it though and with the clowns, I'm at about my capacity.

[Brad A.]

Originally posted by nolofinwe
completely off-topic:

I think somebody should go buy the sunspot anthias at the disadvantage. Great fish, needs a better home than PA.

Is that the sunrise anthias they have there?

Diff name?

[Waterbury Guy]

Sheesh! Sounds like I missed the mother of all meetings!

[nolofinwe]

yea, different common name, i guess.

[Brad A.]

Thats a very kewl fish, I have one, very hardy

[SHOmuchFUN]

Yeah, it's a BEAUTIFUL fish... Jen and I always comment on Brad's when we his tank. Would be a great fish for someone looking for one that's reef safe. I love my tri-color anthias. At least that's what the diss called it. I'm not sure of the actual name.

[Waterbury Guy]

I'm looking for another fish. How much are they asking, and would it be OK in a 55 with 3 other fish.

[Brad A.]

yup, I think like $50 or so.

[SHOmuchFUN]

Yeah, it would be perfect. They are about the size of a decent sized blue chromis.

I thought they were asking a bit more than that? I thought it was closer to $70? I could be wrong, it was a while ago.

[nolofinwe]

I went in to get a couple snails and some salt to hold me over till I order a new bucket, and the anthias was 54$ and staring longingly at the exit.

[SHOmuchFUN]

That's not a bad deal then...

[Brad A.]

I'm tearing down my prop tank and want to offer a couple of nice pieces to club members before I send them to LFS's

My Rose anemone...see gallery pic. This rose has been in captivitey for nearly 13 years. It does great under pc,vho or MH. I made a few $100 selling clones. $50 (its on a nice piece of Live rock)

Lastly, I have a porites worm rock (green) with brightly colored coco worms in it. I would keep this but my main tank is competely full. $30

I also have some other frags of humilis and caps and pociliorpora for free to ever comes and gets them.

PM me soon, I'm leaving state tomorrow and taking the tank down today.

[Brad A.]

actually id go $30 on the rose+rock

[SHOmuchFUN]

What are you doing with the nano's equipment?

[Brad A.]

keep it. its all new stuff

the pH and temp controler and ocean light are less than 6 months old