Howdy, Chris H-C here. This was my first term as president. I'm writing this in Fall 2006, so my memory's a bit fuzzy. That's the problem with our loss of hosting happening sooner than expected, our changeover to new hosting taking longer than expected, and the site redesign taking until the Summer. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This and more will be explained in the saga of the website.

The Saga of CTRL-A.org

The term started with Matt Skala, our then E-Comm officer (who had performed the role for many terms past) letting us know that the MoTD on the CTRL-A web server now told us that we had only a few weeks to pack up all our stuff and bug out. Okay, I'll need to explain some background:

The web hosting for www.ctrl-a.org, .com, etc. has been provided to the club for free by an ex-member (Whose name escapes me) for the past... well, since we stopped being http://ctrl-a.csclub.uwaterloo.ca in the nineties. This was pretty shiny for us as it meant that we could focus club funds on paying for the Really Expensive Projector yet we could have our own domain that wasn't under the UW CSC. A point I should make here is that both of our hosting options were under really nice people, the CSC, and the person's whose name escapes me. We like them. And they like us. Or did, at least.

Due to circumstances outside our sphere of influence, our kind benefactor had to shut down the server ctrl-a.org was on. Permanently. Our web officer asked for an extension on the deadline (the e-mail about it may or may not have been delivered) since he was to be too busy for the first part of term to orchestrate the move. The deadline nevertheless came. We had a few backups and our ex-benefactor provided the non-backed up files that we missed, so everything was cool. Right? Wrong.

Turns out getting webhosting is a little labour-intensive... labour that Conrad (web maintainer) was too busy to commit to. Luckily, Matt (ecomm) has a personal website (and webcomic! Check it out here) and opened up a subfolder for us which Conrad pointed ctrl-a.org, .com, .etc at. (As an incidental note, some of the tlds had passwords that weren't left in the care of the club, but we were still able to point them at different web addresses. Weird and slightly scary). Matt very graciously hosted ctrl-a.org throughout the entirety of the term (until May 8th, when Conrad set up the short-lived PHPBBXS-based site, a remnant of which is the forum) which included WATCON notices, feedback, press releases, and a whole wad of stuff.

As mentioned before, to stop relying on Matt Skala (one of the vocal proponents of being a customer for web hosting) we hooked up with a new hosting service, geekisp.com, and Conrad put up a stopgap site on May 8 that was only supposed to be a placeholder until he or someone else coded a better one. August 18, I put up this site (the one that looks a lot like the old standard, but with navigation on the left) and have been tweaking it and adding content ever since.

So ends the Saga of the Website. By now, you might be wondering what WATCON was all about. WATCON is the name for the mini-convention predominately about anime that was organized by several CTRL-A members including Brett Canavan, Matt Skala, and Amy Yu. It was held on March 18th for the entire day and culminated in the showing of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children as subtitled by Bryan Van Biesbrouck. Planning for the event dates back to the previous term when the concept of a mini-convention was first proposed by Brett.

I had very little to do with the convention, but from all reports the people who attended had a good time. Our vendors were generally pleased as well. There was a hiccough, though, when a FedS exec called into question the legality of showing one of the titles at WATCON. We resolved the situation amicably, and everyone had a good time.

Subsequent to WATCON, remarks made to the A/V Ladies caused a stir resulting in some harsh words and actions. Relationships in UW's A/V department became a bit strained until everything was sorted out. But sorted out it was, and the club soldiered on.

Because of the Advent Children headache, a policy was proposed by Matt Skala that the club obtain permission for every title that we show to put us firmly on the correct side of the law. Previously we had been operating in a grey area, and that made some people in UW staff and FedS a little nervous. Not to mention that we had no official policy for where we stood, resulting in confusion amongst the exec. Since then we've approved and begun enacting the policy. Phasing in of the policy is scheduled to be complete by Fall term. But the end of term had passed, so it was up to next term's exec to carry the torch.

This term's exec were as follows: