We meet at 6:30pm on the second Tuesday of each month at the Farmington Community Library.

Topics Include:

Automating the Mundane Out of Your Life

In the average work day we're faced with a multitude of tasks and decisions. These tasks can range from collating various data sources into an Excel Spreadsheet that gets sent off somewhere else to remembering special occasions and birthdays. We only have so many waking hours in the day so filling these hours with tasks we don't find enjoyable or engaging can make our lives dreary and uninspired. What if there was a ready assistant waiting for you to help you with these tasks, and what if it only took a little bit of thought and planning to utilize this assistant. In this talk Craig Maloney will talk about automating mundane tasks. We'll learn when it's best to automate a task and what tools are available for automation. We'll step through several examples and understand some best practices for when to automate a task. We'll cover practical ways to give ourselves more of the time thinking about interesting problems and automate the mundane tasks to the computer. You won't want to miss this practical look at how to let the computer do what it does best.

Craig Maloney is one of the board members for the Michigan!/usr/group. He also hosts Open Metalcast (a podcast dedicated to Creative Commons Metal Music). He brings over 20 years of experience of using computers to do mundane tasks, and is constantly on the look-out for ways to use computers to improve his life. He blogs at http://decafbad.net

Book Swap

Have you dome sone decluttering around you home or office and found some technical books that you no longer want or need? Want to give them a new home? Please bring your gently books to the meeting where we can swap them. You might even find some real treasures!

Plus we'll have our regular features: Jobs Looking for People, People Looking for Jobs, and much more! We'll also be meeting for dinner at the Buddy's Pizza in Novi (44225 W 12 Mile Road, Novi, MI 48377) after the meeting.