A word from the president

Greetings all;

Hopefully the holidays were good to you.

It was quite hard to come up with something to say for the Havoc. Not quite what to say, but more as how to say it. For the reason why, I'll provide a little background.

I was born and raised in St. Albert, Alberta, Canada (A city of 50,000 that borders Edmonton to the NW). I've always been strong in math and physics, so after high school, it was off to the University of Alberta to study Mechanical Engineering. Now, for those of you who don't know, Engineers are notorious for their poor English skills. This is apparent at U of A. If you enroll there you have to take English 101, a full year course. UNLESS, you're going into Engineering. In that case, you get to take English 199, this is only a half year course, which teaches the very basics. So basic, that in the first class, the professor was telling us "A verb, is an action word". My grammar isn't that bad, but writing has never been my strong suit. As such, I found writing this to be a little hard.

I heard from a friend in the summer of 1998 of a website where you could play A&A online. This delighted me, as I had been playing A&A for the last 4 years, and was finding it hard to find games. So on July 1st, I passed the hurdle, and began my IAAPA experience. It did not start out well, as my GM's in my first two games went MIA. As such, this curbed my interest for the time being. However, in March of 2000, I came back in force, playing as many games as I could handle. Soon after joining, Michael (micwil) got me interested in government. I'm not sure if this was because he actually wanted me in government, or more because he wanted me to stop pestering John with questions and comments about rules. So I began as Deputy Minister of Logs. From there, my government role just kept expanding. A few months after I started, Ian (Polaris) left the club, and I assumed the position as Minister of Logs as well. I also began the process of reviving the Mentorship program. Not having enough to do, and due to some government restructuring, I also took over the Minister of Stats position. In October of 2002, I assumed the position of President when Warren resigned. Luckily for IAAPA, Warren didn't stay away. Shortly after this, Peter (Boromir) assumed the Mentorship Coordinator position, which then allows me to concentrate more time on my two areas - President, and Minister of Stats & Logs.

2003 should bring many interesting changes to IAAPA. Testing to the upgrades to the server will begin within the week. This should finally put to rest the log jam. As well, once the upgrades are complete, we will begin plans to our next two areas of update -> the dice server, and the webpage itself. Many people have already suggested possible improvements for the dice server, and we will be looking over which ones ot do, as well as more input. Besides redesigning the webpage, we are expanding the update team for the website. Instead of putting all of the load on one person, we are spreading out the workload. Besides making this easier for everyone, it will also speed up updates to the webpage. Another thing that should prove to be very exciting this year is the convention. The convention in November has been pushed back to the weekend of August 1st. We have had confirmation from a number of people already, two of which so far are traveling overseas. Jochen will be coming from Germany, and Dan will come from the land down under. I have a few other projects that I will be working on this Spring, and more word about those will come up depending on how much time I have to put into them. Stay tuned.

Good luck in your gaming.

Eric (Raist)