Those of you who follow such things may have noticed that I became SPI President today.

The cool part, though, is how I managed to participate in the special board meeting to select officers today.

The meeting fell in the middle of the drive from our house up into the mountains to the Rocky Ridge Music Center near Estes Park, Colorado, where my daughter is attending a music camp. About 15 minutes before the meeting was supposed to start, we drove out of the edge of GSM phone coverage just beyond the town of Lyons... I turned the car around and drove back into town and parked adjacent to the surprisingly interesting Sandstone Park, which is part of a sculpture trail in the middle of town. My wife and kids wandered around the park while I fired up my new HP nc2400 notebook and established a GPRS connection through my aging Ericsson T39 phone using gprsec, which sadly is not yet packaged for Debian.

Two minor hacks due to my choice of phone. I needed the flag_time=0 option on the ppp_async module command line to work around a bug in the T39 as per the GPRS-HOWTO, and noauth in the ppp config emitted by gprsec.

Participating in the meeting was painless, other than delaying our lunch for a half hour or so... It's really nice when things work the way they're supposed to.