In the February 2000 meeting, I announced that, after 4 years of being your SPARTA president, I would like to turn the job over to someone else. So in our usual process, I will be coming up with the 2000 slate of candidates. We only need to fill the president’s position. So when I call, you know what I will be asking you to accept.

The slate of new officers will be announced at the March meeting. Elections will be at the April meeting and the new officers will take over in May.

We are trying something new this month. The newsletter will be published online this month on our web page. The February 2000 newsletter is already on the web page. Please checkout the web page and let Mike Lockey know if there is anything you would like to add or see on the web page.

Next meeting is on Tuesday March 28th at the DTS firehouse. Pizza, drinks, and dessert will be provided.
 

Future Speakers

Mar. 28 SHARE Winter 2000 Report by Duane Reaugh, Mike Lockey, and Ed Webb
Apr. 25 To be announced

We need ideas and volunteers for future speakers. Please consider giving a presentation at a future meeting. Presentations don’t have to be fancy, just informative and interesting. Even a 5 or 10 minute talk can start an interesting interaction. Contact John Bryant at the phone number or e-mail address below.
 
 

Chris Blackshire - President
Northern Telecom 919-992-4602
P.O. Box 13010
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Chris.Blackshire@nortelnetworks.com

John Bryant - Vice President
Glaxo Wellcome Inc. 919-483-9548
M/S D111; 5 Moore Drive
RTP, NC 27709 JEB33378@GLAXOWELLCOME.COM

Mike Lockey - Secretary
Guilford Co. Information Services 336-412-6235
201 N. Eugene St. 336-227-2021 (Home)
Greensboro, NC 27401 MLOCKEY@netpath.net

Mike Killam - Treasurer
SAS Institute 919-677-8000 x7103
SAS Campus Drive 919-493-7434 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513 Mike.Killam@SAS.COM

Ed Webb - Communications Director
SAS Institute 919-677-8000 x4162
SAS Campus Drive 919-362-0232 (Home)
Cary, NC 27513 EDWISTUO@aol.com

Special location this month; see last page.

Meetings are scheduled for the last Tuesday evening of each month (except no meeting in December), with optional dinner at 6:30 p.m. and the meeting beginning at 7:00 p.m.

These monthly meetings are held at LabCorp’s Center for Molecular Biology and Pathology (CMBP) near the Research Triangle Park (see last page). Take I-40 to Miami Boulevard and go north. Turn right onto Alexander Drive. Go about a mile or so. Then turn right into LabCorp complex and turn Left to the CMBP Building. In the lobby, sign in as a visitor to see Brad Carson. Brad will escort you to the conference room.
 

If you have any ideas for speakers, presentations, newsletter articles, or are interested in taking part in a presentation, PLEASE contact one of the Board of Directors with your suggestions.
 

The SPARTA chapter policy is to mail a copy of the monthly chapter newsletter to each SPARTA member, NaSPA national, each advertiser, persons who have requested a copy, and to other chapters who send us a copy of their newsletter. The newsletter is mailed about the 20th of each month so you can prepare for the meeting. The mailing list is maintained by Mike Lockey at (336) 412-6235; if you have corrections or problems receiving your newsletter, call Mike.
 

Brad Carson now has copies of version 421 dated August 1999 of the CBT tape. Brad brings cartridges to each meeting and swaps a scratch cartridge for a copy of the CBT. If you need a round tape, contact Brad at LabCorp (Brad_Carson@labcorp.com or 336-436-4065) for details on sending a tape to LabCorp.

The new CBT tape is also available from www.cbttape.org.

•Meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM by Chris Blackshire, the Chapter President.

•Fourteen (14) people were present; eleven (11) were members.

•Everyone in the room introduced themselves, told where they worked, and briefly described their job functions.

•The minutes of November 1999 meeting were accepted as published in the January 2000 newsletter. The January 2000 meeting was canceled because of the severe snow storm.

•Mike Killam, the chapter treasurer, presented the Treasurer’s Report:
 

Balance as of September 1999 $ 154.05
Add earlier deposit $ 160.00
Add 8 membership dues $ 160.00 Less food $ 246.35
Less postage; box rental $ 120.79
Balance as of February, 2000 $ 97.91
 

OLD BUSINESS

•Articles are needed for this newsletter. If you would like to write an article for this newsletter, please contact Ed Webb. Keep in mind that you don’t really need to write the article, it can be an article that you read that you would like to share with the membership.

•The SPARTA Web page is now available. To access the SPARTA Web page, point your Web browser to this site: www.netpath.net/~mlockey/sparta.html. Please send any comments or suggestions about the Web page to Mike Lockey (mlockey@netpath.net). Be sure to check the Web page every once in a while to see any new or changed information.

NEW BUSINESS

•Future Speakers and Topics:

March 2000 - SHARE Report by Duane Reaugh, Mike Lockey and Ed Webb
April 2000 - TBA
Other ideas:
- UNIX Services for OS/390
- Workload Manager
- SAP

If you have suggestions about speakers and topics, contact John Bryant.

•The March meeting will be at the DTS “firehouse” in Raleigh. Directions will be in the newsletter, on the web page, and e-mailed via the ListServ.

•Food for the March 2000 meeting will be pizza and sodas.

•Thanks to Brad Carson of LabCorp for hosting the February meeting.

•Annual dues of $20 are due in January 2000.

•To save duplicating and mailing costs, the newsletter will be put on the web site. The newsletter can be viewed and/or printed before the meeting.

•The nominating committee for the 2000-2001 SPARTA board of directors was formed. Chris Blackshire will head the committee. Chris reported he has nominees for every office except President.

If you are interested in any office, please contact Chris. Nominees are:

President open
Vice President John Bryant
Treasurer Duane Reaugh
Secretary Mike Lockey
Communications Ed Webb

•The business portion of the meeting ended at 7:30 PM.

•Mike Dilio of Cisco discussed the Cisco buying of the IBM Network Hardware Division. Topics discussed:

Mike described his background working for IBM and that he joined Cisco in 1993.

Cisco purchased non-SNA products from IBM Network Hardware Division in 1999.

Current customers of IBM equipment are being moved to Cisco equipment.

OSA is recommended attachment, except for Cisco CIP if mixed IP and SNA.

Moving toward “IP centric” world; mainframe will become large IP server.

More joint IBM/Cisco announcements; IBM/Cisco alliance will provide e-commerce solutions (both software and hardware).

IBM/Cisco Interoperability labs.

•The meeting was adjourned at 9:00 PM.

Items of Interest

Recommended PTF has gone PE

A PTF, UW58003 (APAR OW36208), that was recommended at the September 1999 SPARTA meeting, based on suggestions from SHARE in August, has gone PE (PTF-in-Error). See APAR OW41746 (PTF UW67603 for OS/390 R3, other PTFs for later releases). You might want to watch VLF for high CPU and put the fix on after a while just in case.

ServerPac SMF Exit Samples Now Owned by OS/390 SMF

After comments at a SHARE Winter 2000 session that SMF sample exits were missing in the latest OS/390 ServerPac, I ask SPARTA presenter and IBM Software Manufacturing developer, Lucy Miller, for some details. Here’s some excerpts from her response:
Hi Ed,

I went back and dug up the information regarding the transfer of the SMF exits to OS/390 development....

SMF will include the following 7 ‘exits’, as we have in past ServerPac releases:
SMFACTRT
SMFCVXIT
SMFUJV
SMFUSI
SMFUTL
SMFU29
SMFU83.

The following ‘exit’ will be removed:
SMFDUMP.

After much discussion, it was decided NOT to include the SMFDUMP “program” to customers. The reasons were that this “program” ... is using some internal control blocks that are not supposed to be used and the serialization techniques are not sufficient for system code. There is an existing exit, IEFU29, which allows a user to gain control when an SMF data set is full - the user could code a dump in the exit in order to dump a full SMF data set.

(Details on using IEFU29 instead of SMFDUMP)....

With the solution described above, no SMF data set is not being dumped, and we believe that is the most important issue. If there are any customer objections, SMF recommends that a requirement is opened up, and this additional function could be added to the SMF component. If you do decide to open the requirement, please provide the reasons you must have the SMFDUMP program as opposed to the above solution in the Justification section.

I hope this gives you insight into what we have done and why. If you have any other questions, please let me know.

Thanks,
Lucy Miller
For your information, the change was made in OS/390 V2R7. In R8, I found the sample SMF exits in SYS1.SAMPLIB as IEExxxx (for example, IEEU29). At SAS Institute, we have chosen to use our SMFDUMP program for the time being. We will evaluate implementing IEFU29 after we get R8 in production.

Bill Gate’s 10 Rules for Living ... Plus the Golden Rule

Here is a list of 11 things that many high school and college graduates did not learn in school. In his book, Bill Gates talks about how feel-good, politically-correct teachings created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

RULE 1:
Life is not fair; get used to it.

RULE 2:
The world won’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3:
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.

RULE 4:
If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure.

RULE 5:
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

RULE 6:
If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7:
Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents’ generation, try “delousing” the closet in your own room.

RULE 8:
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9:
Life is not divided into semesters. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10:
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

AND HIS GOLDEN RULE...
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.

Humor

Reality

Reaching the end of a job interview, the Human Resources Person asked a young Engineer fresh out of MIT, “And what starting salary were you looking for?” The Engineer said, “In the neighborhood of $125,000 a year, depending on the benefits package.”

The interviewer said, “Well, what would you say to a package of 5 weeks vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, company matching retirement fund to 50% of salary, and a company car leased every 2 years say, a red Corvette?”

The Engineer sat up straight and said, “Wow! Are you kidding?”

And the interviewer replied, “Yeah, but you started it.”

What Goes Around Comes Around

How do crazy people go through the forest?
They take the psycho path.

How do you get holy water?
Boil the hell out of it.

What did the fish say when it hit a concrete wall?
“Dam!”

What do Eskimos get from sitting on the ice too long?
Polaroids.

What do you call a boomerang that doesn’t work?
A stick.

What do you call cheese that isn’t yours?
Nacho Cheese.

What do you call Santa’s helpers?
Subordinate Clauses.

What do you call four bullfighters in quicksand?
Quatro sinko.

What do you get from a pampered cow?
Spoiled milk.

What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?
Frostbite.

What lies at the bottom of the ocean and twitches?
A nervous wreck.

What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?
Anyone can roast beef.

Membership in the SPARTA chapter is $20.00 per year for January through December. The 2000 chapter dues are due January 1, 2000. Please renew your membership! If you want to join SPARTA, please send your check for $20.00 for the 2000 annual dues to either:
 

Treasurer Secretary
Mike Killam Mike Lockey
SAS Institute SPARTA
SAS Campus Drive P.O. Box 13194
Cary, NC 27513 Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3194
Work (919) 677-8000 x7103 Work (336) 412-6235
 

Make check payable to SPARTA. The membership dues are not prorated to simplify our accounting procedures. Please include the membership application form with your check.
 
 

As a member, you may request copies of the handouts for any meeting from any officer.

Go to the Raleigh Beltline (also known as I-440): From the west, take I-40 East to the Wade Avenue exit, continue on Wade Ave. passing under Blue Ridge Road to I-440 and take the Inner Beltline (right under the bridge, generally heading north); From the east, get to I-440 (Outer Beltline) any way you can.

Once you’re on the Beltline, take Wake Forest Road exit and head South toward Downtown Raleigh. Get in the Right lane, but watch for Alcatel and Blockbuster on the left. Directly across from Blockbuster, partially hidden by trees, is the DTS firehouse. Turn right and park in front on the concrete pad, or take the second driveway (blacktop) to parking around back.

The phone number is 919-833-8426; the address is 2913 Wake Forest Road.
 

SPARTA News
P.O. Box 13194
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-3194
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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