There is very little to add to Bob 's autobiography except for one question. How long has Bob been the treasurer? Since I joined in 1997 I 've known him as our treasurer.Thank you Bob for all the hard work you 've done for MLMUG over the years.

— Maria O. Arguello

 

Bob & Karen Barton

Bob Barton is MLMUG's member of the month for August 2002. Bob is our treasurer and membership chairperson. He does odd jobs such as playing with the audio-visual system at SCT, helping Dr. Mike with the newer users groups on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays, keeping membership records, preparing the meeting signin list, taking occasional member, trip and meeting pictures and maintaining the members area of the MLMUG web site. His other duties include, collecting dues and other monies for auctions, trips and shirts and maintaining the treasury records. Bob was unavailable for comment this month because he is traveling in the Bahamas. He also reported an unexplained large expenditure from the treasury shortly before he left on this unexpected trip. ;-)

Bob and wife Karen live in Bryn Mawr with several Macs and a three cats. The cats have not learned to use the mouse effectively yet but tune in next year for a progress report. Three of the Macs (IIX, Performa 6400 and Performa 6116) are used daily for communication (email and letter writing), web surfing, finance, database maintenance and digital picture viewing and editing. The other four (Power Book models 100, 180 and 1400) get infrequent use. The two Performas and the 1400 have all been "G3'd" with Sonnet cards to provide good speed. As these model numbers illustrate, Bob is not leaping into Apple's G4 and OSX yet and runs OS 8.6 on all but the IIX. Steve Jobs may think OS 9 is dead - Bob doesn't have an opinion there yet but is quite happy with OS 8.6 at the moment.

Bob works at Lockheed Martin in King of Prussia and is forced to use Wintel PCs, a Sun (UNIX) workstation and an IBM "big iron" mainframe but he still has a PowerBook 1400 available for emergency relief use. MLMUG's president and vice president also work at "LockMart" and it is not clear whether LockMart is taking over MLMUG or MLMUG is taking over LockMart. Bob prefers to believe that both LockMart and MLMUG simply select good people for positions of trust and responsibility (the Bahamas note above was humor - this year).

Bob helps Karen in her wellness education, arts-medicine and fund raising work by keeping database records and acting as webmaster for IAMA, the International Arts Medicine Association at where Karen is Executive Director. 2002 was the 10th year that Karen organized "Michael's Day" at Main Line Health and Fitness and raised almost $30K to benefit the home care program at Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia, bringing the 10 year total to over $100K.

So far the number of records for IAMA databases and the MLMUG member database have not gone over 600 and the database component of AppleWorks (version 5.X) has been satisfactory. The week before each MLMUG meeting, a record selection is made and records are hidden for those with membership expiration dates are up to a couple of months before the meeting. The signin list layout is selected and the result is saved as a pdf file which is emailed to SCT where it is printed for security desk use on MLMUG meeting days. Attendance is tracked by photocopying the paper list and using it to update an attendance field in the database. Bob can tell you if you signed in at a meeting several years ago.

For MLMUG members pages and badges, Bob gets or takes a digital picture and crops, rescales to 60 x 83 pixels and "sharpens" it to arrive at a small JPEG file for the MLMUG online rogues gallery. Bob says Jim Long, MLMUG's VP, simply prints the same picture onto thick badge material and laminates it.

Bob keeps MLMUG's treasury records using Quicken 2001 on a Mac. He also does personal finances with Quicken and highly recommends using online banking to avoid drudge work and skip math errors. Writing most of a month of checks consists of 3 clicks each to select from an "online payee" file, fill in the amount, add a category and memo and hit the return key. After the checks for a week are "written", a few more clicks upload the data to CheckFree and the bank and they transfer funds or print and mail a check. All this for a monthly fee that is lower than postage cost. Bob is experienced with finances and served as treasurer of the Philadelphia Grotto of the National Speleological Society (cavers) for several years before he got smart, fat and lazy.

In addition to Apple Macs, Bob's advanced age (he is 60 this year) has allowed him to work with some earlier computers. At the GE Large Motor and Generator Department in Schenectady, NY, he dealt with an early IBM processor that used a rotating magnetic drum for it's huge 5KB of memory (RAM nowadays) and punched cards for storage (disk drives now). At GE Aerospace, he used a "hybrid" computer with the best (or worst) features of analog and digital computing devices married together for wind turbine design analysis. He once "borrowed" a Burroughs system allegedly dedicated to text processing to do engineering calculations using the Basic programming language. He was also a member of the Main Line Commodore Users Group, still run by MLMUG member Emil Volcheck, and has a C-64 "Executive" model transportable lying around.

Bob has degrees in electrical and mechanical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Villanova respectively and a law degree from Temple. While he keeps his PA bar and patent office "tickets" current, he is not actively practicing. In addition to walking several miles with Karen a few mornings a week and pushing a little iron at the gym, Bob plays racquetball and occasionally cycles to keep a finely tuned body hidden beneath his exterior persona.