I first became involved with the NYC Smalltalk user’s group back in 1996 when I left Florida Power & Light to embark on a consulting gig at the then called Brooklyn Union Gas. Back then Jeff Britton and Ted McKnight were the co-chairs and I believe that before them there were some other leads. I took over, if I recall correctly, back in 2000. Ever since 1996 we have been meeting on a pretty consistent basis. Somehow, we just manage to get enough participation from the community as well as material that we ourselves put together. I do wish that more of our local Smalltalkers would make it a point to present at least once a year. I think that people make too much of a big deal of things. I am told that in Argentina and Europe Smalltalkers just meet in cafe’s and someone just takes the lead on a topic. Tonight, Tom Sattler will be presenting on VisualWorks Web Tool Kit , a JSP spec compliant implementation among other things. This is Tom’s second year. I really appreciate his participation at this level. Tom is also one of our regulars. In January we have another local presenting, my co-worker Rob Fossella. Rob has been “coerced” into that presentation but my sincere hope is that next year it won’t take too much arm twisting Next month we have Maurice Rabb visiting us. Maurice has developed a new dialect of Smalltalk called Microlingua which targets small devices. Maurice is from Chicago but I hear that he likes NYC quite a lot , so who knows maybe he will become a local.