Subject: From the maintainer of CCL

From: Jan Labanowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 14:10:51 -0400 (EDT)

Dear CCL Subscriber,

This is your list maintainer speaking {:-)}... Do not touch this d(ial)...

I will try to be short...

This will consist of: help-mes, my plans, thank yous, and appeal
to your benevolent instincts (i.e., help guys and galls, again...).

I want to thank all of you who either bought CCL Archives CD sets from us,
or who gave us donations. Your help is very needed and VERY APPRECIATED.
All the CCL members owe you for that, since this keeps CCL running.

If you did not do it yet, please help CCL financially:
You can either get invoiced and buy set of 4 CDs representing CCL Archives,
or just give us a donation which can be deducted from taxes in the US, and
probably other countries too. For details check:

    http://www.ccl.net/chemistry/aboutccl/supporting/

Again I want to thank all of you who helped me up to date. No donation is
too small, and if each of you gave me $25 I would have all my needs covered.
But since the current number of supporters is less than a hundred, please
try also to make up for those who cannot or may not contribute.

We will soon have vacation time. For some of us it is the busiest time
to do research, since the lines to equipment are shorter, many students
are gone fishing, and the teaching load is low... For some of us
it is time we do travel, take a rest, go to conferences, etc. 

I will take some time off during summer, early June to mid July
(guess where I go: to Poland... and hopefully to some other countries
around). While usually I want to be close to a phone jack and have a
laptop at hand, this time may be different. I plan to spend some time
out there in the middle of nowhere (namely on the ridges of Beskid
mountains). At the same time, I want the CCL to continue operating...

The only way CCL can continue operation is that I get help.
Thanks to the OSC management and their help and encouragement, and
the help of CCL subscribers through their donations and purchases,
I have some hourly/undergraduate students working with me in maintaining
CCL and doing the daily chores. This is tremendous help since
I am getting busier and busier every month (or maybe I just get less
efficient {:-)}) and without the help of students, it would be very
hard for me to keep CCL going. Unfortunately, the student turnaround
is quite fast, and once they learn "the stuff" about Web and sysadm,
they get better jobs outside OSU campus.

I would like to have a more stable environment for CCL and more experienced
students to operate the resource. It would be nice to have it now,
before I take off abroad. One way of achieving it is to get Graduate
Student Assistants (GRA) who are more dependable, more experienced,
and if you pay their tuition, they have a reason to stay with you.
Vacations is also good time to get the students since it is decision
time for them. CCL has a lot of needs: update archives, find new material,
install and improve operating software for the list and Web site,
upgrade hardware and organization, upgrade firewall and security, etc...
Please consider helping me financially. Now you can use research grant
money to do this. Review the page:

    http://www.ccl.net/chemistry/aboutccl/supporting/

If you are a graduate student, please encourage your Ph.D. advisor to
buy the CCL Archives CD Set. Just do it, please...

If you cannot help financially, please consider contributing good messages
to CCL discussions, and give us some software or write-ups to put in
CCL archives. Please help me in keeping this resource useful, current,
and interactive. Note that we also want to expand our service to the
community with more specialized discussions lists:
       http://www.AtomicScaleDesign.Net
We are operating within the academic environment and we are very careful
to have a broad support base and non-allied status. In is not about money
for us, and if we cannot do it this way, we will not do it. Please help!!!

Thank you for you attention and contributions throughout all these years.
Can you imagine that the CCL is more than 10 years old? We were here
before the Web and hype... So please help us to be here now and long
after the scum and hype dissipates.

Jan Labanowski
[email-masked]

Jan K. Labanowski            |    phone: 614-292-9279,  FAX: 614-292-7168
Ohio Supercomputer Center    |    Internet: [email-masked] 
1224 Kinnear Rd,             |    http://www.ccl.net/chemistry.html
Columbus, OH 43212-1163      |    http://www.ccl.net/