CUUG Upcoming Meetings

January General Meeting

Making Things Just Work: from Computers to Pipes

Speaker: Roy Brander, CUUG Life Member and retired Senior Infrastructure Engineer, Calgary Water Resources

Roy Brander has been a CUUG member for 35 years this year, with 25 of them as an employee of the City of Calgary and its Water Resources departments, developing their CAD and GIS systems, but also worked as an Infrastructure Engineer managing their pipes.

For January 2026, Roy will be covering multiple topics:

• He was unable to properly install Linux Mint on a Windows 11 laptop that had been installed with "RST" (RAID) driver support at a low level in the hard drive interface - one Linux cannot use. A workaround was developed.
• Rather than solving that problem entirely, the workaround was sufficient, and there will be a short editorial discussion of just kludging your way through a lot of computer solutions, that "doing it right" may sometimes be just not worth your time.
• This will segue into a short presentation of all the things you can do with now-near-worthless old equipment: Two "media player" Linux machines, and an all-day webcam, watching a construction site, when the machine had no other uses...something of a sequel to his 25-year-old "BSDwall" project that gave a second life to about 25 old 486 machines from DeVry, headed for a dump.
• And then the conversation will take a sharp right-angle turn into the real (or "real") story of the Calgary Watermain Break: What went wrong this time, and (probably) why. The story he couldn't get out in his multiple media interviews, because they just cut and paste what serves the narrative.

Roy Brander is a CUUG Life Member. He has given a number of presentations on a wide variety of subjects, including the BSDWall project, the MEPIS Linux distribution, the Titanic, management of Calgary's water mains, and the ASUS Eee PC and Moore's Law. Roy has retired from his position as the Senior Infrastructure Engineer for Water Resources, The City of Calgary, and now lives in a Vancouver condo overlooking Stanley Park. He'll be coming to us virtually from there, via Teams.

707 Fifth

707 - 5 St. S.W.
Fourth floor, Black Duck office ← NOTE LOCATION! Same location as last November's meeting.

Parking is available one block south of the meeting location, at the Centennial Parkade (Lot 54). Additional parking is available at The CORE and Holt Renfrew Parkades just east of the meeting location.

5:30 PM, Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Snacks at 17:30. Meeting begins at 18:00.

Attendance is free for CUUG members, or $10 (cash or e-Transfer) at the door for non-CUUG members.

RSVP to office at CUUG if you plan to attend.

See the main CUUG web page for general information about CUUG.