Table of Contents Our Principals: Our Creed: Venture Crew 369: Our Web Page: Our E-Mail Addresses Calendar of Events: Book Binding Campout Crew Finances Up-an-Coming Member Expenses Quote of the Month Life A Challenge Thank You 369 Venturing Crew 369's Web Site 6,000,000 Hits Star Office Vs. Word Being on a Team Web page preprocessing PGP is Pretty Good Privacy Scouting and Religion A Thought for Scout Sunday The First International Jamboree No TV for a Week! New Web Counters

WOW 6,000,000 Hits! PostScript Version - PDF Version to big:-(

Our Principals 1) Honor before all else.  2) The difference between a winner and a loser is that the winner tried one more time.  3) K.I.S.M.I.F.  4) Y.C.D.B.S.O.Y.A.  Our Web Page: http://www.venturingbsa.com

E-Mail Us! Our Creed Exploring: Enthusiasm, Energy, & Excellence  Venturing Crew 369 Venturing Crew 369 was chartered on December 31, 1994 to the Reformation Luthern Church.  Venturing Crew 369 specializes in UNIX for Programmers while emphasizing a deep theme of Engineering Computer Information & Science; Membership in Venturing Crew 369 is open to young men and women between the ages of 14 [and in high school] and not yet 20.  Annual Membership fees are $25.00.

Calendar of Events:

Adventure Articles are due.  10/29/00

VOA Elections and Annual Banquet  11/04/00

Guest Speaker, Scott Warmbier, Qwest  11/07/00

Church Dinner, we ar cooking it!  11/12/00

Campout  11/17-19/00

Knight's Night Out  11/25/00

Adventure Articles are due.  11/25/00

St. Stephen's Food Drive  11/16/00

Knight's Night Out  11/16/00

St. Stephen's Food Drive  11/17/00

Christmas Party  11/19/00

No meeting  11/26/00

Adventure Articles are due.  11/24/00

Guest Speaker, Dana Ritter, Nationwide  01/02/01

Winter Campout Out  01/19-21/01

Knight's Night Out  01/27/01

Adventure Articles are due.  01/27/01

Guest Speaker, Steve Romig, Cptr Forensics  01/30/01

Court-of-Honor, Pot Luck Banquet, Sleepover  02/3-4/01

Klondike Derby  02/16-18/01

Knight's Night Out  02/24/01

Adventure Articles are due.  02/24/01

Knight's Night Out  03/24/01

Campout  03/23-25/01

Adventure Articles are due.  03/24/01

Campout  04/27-29/01

Knight's Night Out  04/21/01

Adventure Articles are due.  04/21/01

Adventure Articles are due.  05/26/01

Campout  06/15-17/01

Knight's Night Out  06/23/01

Adventure Articles are due.  06/23/01

Summer Camp $175.00  07/1-7/01

Knight's Night Out  07/28/01

Adventure Articles are due.  07/28/01

Campout  08/17-19/01

Knight's Night Out  08/25/01

Adventure Articles are due.  08/25/01

Open House  09/11/01

Knight's Night Out  09/22/01

Adventure Articles are due.  09/22/01

Book Binding Campout  09/28-30/01

Campout  10/26-28/01

Adventure Articles are due.  10/28/01

VOA Elections and Banquet  11/02/01

Adventure Articles are due.  11/24/01

Christmas Party  12/18/01

Adventure Articles are due.  12/22/01

Quote of the Month Life

Unknown

All men die, but not every man truly lives!

A Challenge

Heather Ward

A familiar question on a college campus is "What is your major?". Although differently worded, this question is essentially equivalent to the "What do you want to be when you grow up?" that we dealt with for years. At least there aren't thousands of majors, whereas I'm sure thousands of types of jobs exist. My answer is a single word: Biology. Others don't have a cut-and-dry answer. And my peers have moved on to another, more menacing question, "What type of doctor do you want to be?" I don't have any answer to this question. I have explored a few different fields, but nothing fits right. Nothing truly excites me, at least not yet. So much frustration has been hounding me regarding this subject, I've wondered if I even want to be a doctor. This led me to a quandary, which is the lesson to be learned from my experience: What am I passionate about, and what excites me?

After some thought, answers became clearer. I am passionate about music: whether playing or listening, it's the purest and bluntest form of expression. I am excited about the prospect of another trip to Germany. The people, the culture, and the landscape are all fun and fascinating to me. And I am very excited about our crew. This group contains the most motivating and fun individuals I have been privileged to work with. I cannot wait to see what this organization does in the future.

The result of this contemplation lead me to a few answers. Perhaps I would like to experiment in musical therapy. Another option I see is medical informatics, apparently an opening field (as a nice gentleman in the OSU Medical Bookstore pointed out to me). In any case, I am now left at the next step: to take these ideas and make something of them. With the support of the people around me, I don't see this as an impossible task. I would strongly suggest to anyone to take a few minutes and answer the same questions for themselves. What are you passionate about?

Thank You 369

Neil Coplin

I'm glad I joined Venturing Crew 369. Every now and then in life, it's easy to get depressed when things aren't going as planned. These are the times when the people around you really matter. Through the sheer optimism of those around you can brighten your mood. While I originally joined Crew 369 for the technical knowledge, it has brought me something even more important -- friends.

It's the silly or small things that seem to mean the most. For instance the Crew recently had a campout at Camp Lazarus. Even though most of what we did was just talk, play euchre and cook, it's one of those times where nothing goes wrong (or if it does, it's not a problem). Even though I'm good friends with some of the members of the Crew outside of crew meetings, I often don't get to see them. So it's these events that I can be with friends... be where I belong.

So I thank you 369, for all that you have brought me these past two years. Knowledge, friendship, inspiration, and optimism. It's because of you that I know anything is possible.

Venturing Crew 369's Web Site

Wesley Miller Southern Region Venturing President

I am the Southern Region Venturing President. I found your website while serving around the net. It is unbelievable! It is the best site I have ever seen. Not to mention all the Venturing stuff. Thanks for the work and keep it up.

6,000,000 Hits

Charts and graphs as of 10/16/00

Daily Average Monthly Totals

	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	              Hits   Files   Pages   Visits   Sites    KBytes   Visits    Pages    Files     Hits   
	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
	Oct    2000   10059   8959   2968     654   4633   1457925    9816   44524   134389   150888  
	Sep    2000   10803   9864   4068     652   7196   3362257   19588  122066   295924   324112  
	Aug    2000    8114   7472   3665     552   6052   2669026   17139  113626   231650   251548  
	Jul    2000    8018   7494   4313     749   5242   2496874   23219  133704   232344   248564  
	Jun    2000    7765   7293   4535     609   5050   2614987   18273  136063   218791   232950  
	May    2000    5326   4817   1823     461   5477   1650755   14298   56537   149340   165135  
	Apr    2000    5350   4836   1566     612   6542   1586929   18376   47005   145090   160509  
	Mar    2000    5723   4950   1793     727   6572   1546162   22549   55585   153462   177436  
	Feb    2000    5674   4989   1416     484   6741   1472943   14037   41075   144695   164571  
	Jan    2000    5371   4588   1132     381   6902   1486434   11833   35111   142255   166517  
	Dec    1999    4494   3862   1160     414   5575   1463160   12859   35963   119735   139315  
	Nov    1999    4873   4149   1022     365   6461   1209616   10978   30681   124474   146201  
	     Totals                                       23017068  192965  851940  2092149  2327746  
	-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On October 21st, 1999 Venturing Crew 369's web site had 3,790,751 hits. In one year 369 had over 2,000,00 hits bringing them to over 6,000,000 hits. This 37% total increase brought 369 1,000,000 hits in only 7 months. 369 is receiving more hits a day than the most "unit" pages have in two years. The average visitor views 15.37 pages. Giving us one of the stickiest Scouting Sites on the web.

I could only find a few "national" Scouting web pages that displayed its hits. (macscouter.com) with about 1,000 hits a week, the Tiland world jamboree site with 1,110,000 hits, and the official 2002 World Jamboree Site with 23,135 hits this year... This puts 369 in Great company at the top of the heap:-)

I guess all of the praise goes to the youth that have put in so much time and effort to keep the 369 web page at its high level of content and quality. Keep up the good work!

Star Office Vs. Word

Aaron Croyle Age: 19

I used to say if I could break my dependency on MS Office, I'd never boot windows again. Well it's the truth. I successfully installed StarOffice 5.2 earlier this month and I'm never going back. Here is the anecdote that led to my epiphany: I was in a hurry to write my Chemistry lab report so I sat down in front of Word (on a friend's machine) and began to type. I completed the report, including some spiffy tables, and went for a walk across campus to the public printer. I copied the file through the NT network to the machine I was at and opened it in Word there. Well much to my surprise Word decided to crash the whole box when I attempted to print, that what I get for using a public lab I figured. So I move to the next machine and try again, Word crashes before the file is even loaded. "Well this is getting me nowhere," thought I. So I traipsed back to my room to ponder the situation (one hour or so before the report was due).

I can no longer get in front of the machine where the file resides, so I boot my box to windows and pull the file through the network. Having Notepad as my only editing application (Windows is just for games) I open the file hoping to be able to strip out the text with out crashing. When I get in the file I find that every character is separated by spaces and four revisions exist with in the file. Well, maybe the problem was just the public lab, so I attempt to open the file on my roommate's computer. Result: CRASH! OK, I can delete allot of spaces and random characters, so I open the file, unchanged or so I though since I never told word to save. Notepad informs me that the file is now to large for it to handle and that I should use Wordpad, which is not installed.

And then a light shines down on me "StarOffice." Perhaps it is more Word compliant than Word? So I dash back to Linux fortunately already having the 80 meg Download (yay for T1). I speed through the install and open my file, and lo it opens up fine. After making a few changes I save the file, and the size drops from 45k to just 18k (still in .doc format), what does that tell you about bloat. I dart back to the roommate's computer, ftp from my linux box, open in Word and... Wonder of wonders it's happy to print. I take my printout and dart of to lab, only 15 minutes late at this point. The moral of the story is even MS isn't MS compliant, just use StarOffice and get smaller files as well. I am also made to believe that using Star does not save all you personal info in to each file multiple times as Word does.

Being on a Team

My 12 year old nephew is trying out for the wrestling team. The coach has yet to make the cuts. He is running every day, diligently doing his exercises. He wants to make the team. My brother has but one rule for this young lad: You may quit up until you make the team. Once cuts are over then you are on the team for the entire season. For you are a part of the team. If the team wins or looses, if he is good or bad, he must stay on the team.

I am so proud of my brother for this! So few people today, in our high tech world, realize the non-verbal commitments they make when they join a team. That team may be your work, church, Scouts, sales swap meets, whatever! When you join a team you are expected to live up to the requirements of that team. A weak person will spout off: "I never promised I would be there!" Yes you did, when you joined! Since you are expected to come, you are expected to inform others if you can't make it. If you know weeks in advance that you will not be attending an event, then let the team know weeks in advance. They might be able to change the date and/or find a replacement for you. It is wrong to hope that you will be able to attend than only give the team 24 hours notice. Oh sure, there are times that this in unavoidable: death of a loved one, you are admitted in the hospital... Not, something better came up!

Scheduling Conflicts are always arising in one's life. Make the best of it. Sometimes you have to choose one event over the other. Be a man and stand up to your responsibilities and let the team you are deciding to let down know far enough in advance that they can make plans without you! If you can't keep a calendar months, if not years, in advance then you have no right joining a team! Go find a group or gang instead. A team is made up of trustworthy dependable people!

On a proverbial campout a chap said he was going, promised he would be there. On the night of departure the team waited an hour and a half for him to show. They called his home and the answering machine was "broken". Finally the team decided to leave without him.

The entire team was punished due to his unwillingness to be accountable for his word. The group had to set up camp in the dark. Most of the burnable wood was already taken for other units' campfires. The choice spots were taken by the early arrivers. People had uncomfortable rides due to the lack of his vehicle. The cost perperson rose since he did not live up to his financial obligations.

The following week the chap tried to avoid the leaders. He dodged all conversations about the campout! When he finally was confronted: "What happened, is everything all right?..." His only response was "sorry." He did not feel he owned the team an explanation!

What I have found in groups is that people are unwilling to commit to events until the week of the event so they can back out without loss of honor.

Warning: You have no honor if you can't make a commitment! You are valueless if your commitments are meaningless!

Stand up for yourself. Make sure others can trust your word. If they can't trust your word then they can't trust you.

Remember that your actions and commitments effect the "word" of others. Others may make promisees for the team based on your commitments. When you do not live up to your obligations harm, if not destroy, the reputations of both the team and its leaders!

Be good for your word!

S. Potter Adult

A small web site is a simple thing to maintain. For my personal web pages (only about four or five), I write all my code by hand and modify the files one by one when I want to change them. It is easy for me to make things stay consistent that way. But things are a lot different when you have hundreds of pages to maintain. Keeping consistency becomes much more difficult and time consuming. The larger the site, the more difficult it is. When you reach the size of the Crew website, it becomes almost impossible. Many solutions have arisen to deal with the difficulty of maintain large web sites. Some of them are used strictly on the back end of the process, during the page creation/generation phase. Some of them are used on the front end, when the pages are being rendered on the users screen. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

On the Crew web site we use a couple of different approaches. For the most part, we concentrate on the rendering side of things. In the past, we used server side includes (SSI) to load common or dynamic code into pages. We've recently started to move to using PHP for including common content. The biggest advantages to this is that we can provide dynamic content, pages that change every time they are viewed (such as our page counter, or a clock) and we can change and upload one file and have the changes show up on all pages immediately. One of the problems with the rendering solutions is that it increases the load on the server. Each time the page is served, the content must be reloaded. Another problem with this solution is that certain kinds of common code cannot be handled during rendering. For example, much of the header information must be available before the page can even be rendered.

Another option is during creation and generationusing a preprocessor, such as with GTML (http://www.lifl.fr/~beaufils/gtml). The way this works is similar to the C preprocessor (cpp) -- a program is told what content is common to all files, and it puts that common code into each file before it is ever uploaded to the web server. Using this approach, any part of the file can be changed. This approach also decreases the load on the server, the program only has to generate each page once. However, if the pages are generated on a different machine than the server, it can be difficult for the maintainer to easily upload all the changed files. Also, content cannot be dynamic with a prepocessor. Since the pages are generated once, the content is always what it was during the generating stage.

A large, well maintained site will find the need for both of these solutions. There are some situations where a preprocessor is best, and there are some situations where a server processor is best.

PGP is Pretty Good Privacy

Jonathan Hogue Adult

Sending e-mail through the internet can be equated to sending post cards through the Post Office. Sure, people shouldn't read them along the way, but certainly, they have the ability to. PGP helps solve this problem.

PGP uses the RSA encryption algorithm. Basically, (and I mean very basically), the encryption relies on the fact that it is easy to multiply two very large prime numbers, but once you have the result, it is very hard to determine what two numbers were used to make the result. The encryption is succeptable to brute force attacks. You can try and guess my decryption key, but it will take you a long time to do it. Guessing the maximum available computing power to any individual (probably held by the NSA), and knowing the strength of my encryption it will take at least 10 years to brute forcingly decrypt my message.

In fact, the encryption in PGP is so solid, federal government's tend not to like it. In fact, it is illegal in Russa to use the encryption, and illegal in the United States to export the encryption technology.

http://cryptography.org/ge-pgp.htm#IS_PGP_LEGAL_

In 1991, PGP was releases as freeware by its author Phil Zimmerman and quickly became the most used e-mail encryption software in the world. Between 1993-1996, Zimmerman faught criminal charges from the federal government for the distribution of the PGP software.

http://www.pgp.com/phil/

PGP works by creating two encryption keys. The first key is your private key, and it is used to unlock messages. The second key is a public key that you distribute. It is used to encode messages, that only your private key can unlock. Your private key is protected by a pass phrase. If someone wants to break your encryption (and they don't have 10 years to wait for a brute force attack), they have to steal your private key and figure out your passphrase.

PGP is free for non-commercial use. You can download PGP and find more information about it at:

http://web.mit.edu/network/pgp.html

Scouting and Religion

The other day a fellow church member took me aside and asked me to give up Boy Scouts since there is no religion on Scouting and join Awanas. I was floored by this comment. What, no religion in Scouting? Not!

If anyone took a look at the media lately, Boy Scouts is all over it for standing up for the Religious and Moral Rights. In fact they went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and won.

I have come to the concluion that the amount of Religion in a unit is depending upon the amount of religion in the unit leader! I know that I have, on several ocations, been taken aside by parents asking me to remove religion from my program. I reply, "I understand your point of veiw but God "IS" a part of our program and your son/daughter is more than welcome to be apart also!" I have never had any parent take their youth out!

A Thought for Scout Sunday

Baden-Powell Scouting for Boys

A Scout is Reverent.

A Scout is reverent toward God.

He is faithful in his religious duties.

The old knights were very religious. They were always careful to attend religious services, especially before going into battle or undertaking any serious difficulty. They considered it the right thing always to be prepared for death. Besides worshipping God in church, the knights always recognized His work in the things which He made, such as animals, plants, and all scenery.

And so it is with peace scouts today. Wherever they go they love the woodlands, the mountains, and the prairies, and they like to watch and know about the animals that inhabit them, and the wonders of the flowers and plants.

No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws. So every Scout should have religion.

Religion seems a very simple thing: First: Love and serve God. Second: Love and serve your neighbor.

In doing your duty to God always be grateful to Him. Whenever you enjoy a pleasure or a good game, or succeed in doing a good thing, thank Him for it, if only with a word or two, just as you say grace at a meal. And it is a good thing to bless other people. For instance, if you see a train starting off, just pray for God's blessing on all that are in the train.

In doing your duty towards man, be helpful and generous, and always be grateful for any kindness done to you, and be careful to show that you are grateful. Remember again that a present given to you is not yours until you have thanked the giver for it.

While you are living your life on earth, try to do something good which may remain after you.

One writer says: "I often think that when the sun goes down the world is hidden by a big blanket from the light of heaven, but the stars are little holes pierced in that blanket by those who have done good deeds in this world. The stars are not all the same size; some are big, some are little, and some men have done great deeds and others have done small deeds, but they have made their hole in the blanket by doing good before they went to heaven."

Try to make your hole in the blanket by good work while you are on earth.

It is something to be good, but it is far better to do good.

The First International Jamboree

Olympia, London, 7 August 1920

When the whole arena was a sea of Scouts ... Baden-Powell saluted them, then joined them to walk across the arena through an impressive and colorful lane of flags of all the nations represented at the Jamboree.

Mounting the highest tier of the dais, he turned and faced the great gathering. The moment had come for him to close the Jamboree, to bid the Scouts good-bye. But before he knew what was happening, he heard a clear boyish voice proclaim aloud, "We, the Scouts of the World, salute you, Sir Robert Baden-Powell -- Chief Scout of the World!"

Chief Scout of the World! B-P hesitated, taken completely aback. As he slowly raised his hand in the Scout sign, the cheering abruptly ceased. There were a few seconds of impressive silence before his voice rang out with its accustomed force to the farthest corners of the building:

Brother Scouts, I ask you to make a solemn choice. Differences exist between the peoples of the world in thought and sentiment, just as they do in language and physique. The war has taught us that if one nation tries to impose its particular will upon others, cruel reaction is bound to follow. The Jamboree has taught us that if we exercise mutual forbearance and give-and-take, then there is sympathy and harmony. If it be your will, let us go forth from here determined that we will develop among ourselves and our boys that comradeship, through the world-wide spirit of the Scout brotherhood, so that we may help to develop peace and happiness in the world and good will among men. Brother Scouts, answer me -- will you join in this endeavor?

A thundering shout answered him: "Yes!"

"God speed you in your work, "Baden-Powell concluded. "And fare you well. "

No TV for a Week!

I asked the youth of our Crew to not watch TV for one week. Go cold turkey. On proclaimed that it was impossible. That he couldn't do it! Others all agreed to try. On mother even agreed that the entire family would go without. I must admit that I have from time to time wanted to turn that box on. But I have resisted. I have sustained now for two weeks. One before, and the one during!