The Lighthouse -- April 1995 The Lighthouse -- April 1995Speaking of thanks, I'd like to publically thank all those who helped with my display of Scouting information at the mall during Scout-Guide Week. Everyone who helped was greatly appreciated.
Several groups have been involved in donating money to the ``Kids' Safety Village'' now being built in Whitby. Kristina McCann (668-6615) is co-ordinating this effort and there should be a Scout presence in the new miniature village.
A Water Charge Certificate course is presently going on and was pictured in the Toronto Star's Oshawa/Durham section on April 20.
Recent events in Beavering including a very successful ``Tail Slap'' event with 122 participants. Some Scouts had a great time doing ``Laser Quest'' and they'd like to challenge a team of Cubs next year. Ten adults received their camp certificates at a recent course and everyone else has also been busy doing what they do.
Among others, this includes group committee members, auxiliary members, honourary members, and inactive Gilwellians (e.g. those who attend the Gilwell reunions).
[Editor's note: Since this was written, it has been decided that inactive Gilwellians do not have to be registered.]
This is a change from previous years. If we do not supply the National Council with the requested information, those Scouters who are 70 and over will not be covered by the insurance policy. Please call the district registrar, if you have any members 70 or older.
The big day is Saturday, May 27, 1995. Park Passports are specially priced at just $18.00 each, all taxes included. Child 3-6 yrs. and adults 60+ years Passports are only $15.00 each. Leaders receive one free Park Passport for every 20 prepaid Passports. Group meal pricing is also available.
May 27 Park Passports and meals must be ordered before May 1. District President Brian Wick has a form if you need one.
ALTERNATE VISIT OFFER. If your group is not available to attend on May 27th, specially priced Park Passports ($18.50) are available for an alternate spring date. Select any one weekend date (Sat./Sun.) between May 7 and July 1. Orders are to be sent at least 3 weeks prior to your date of visit.
There will be a new ride again this year. This one is called Top Gun -- ``Canada's only inverted, looping jet coaster.'' That ride is probably not something for your Beavers, but it sounds good for the older kids.
For more information please call the Group Sales Department at (905) 832-7400 or FAX (905) 832-7499.
This year marks the 50,000,000th tree planted in the Scoutrees (formerly ``Trees for Canada'') program. Besides the official 50,000,000th tree which was planted at Scout headquarters in Ottawa, near the first tree, a special tree was planted by the Ontario Provincial Council April 29 at GM headquarters near the Oshawa/Clarington border.
You have a chance to hear a short presentation prior to the next council meeting here in Whitby. Guest speaker Murray Ormarod will be speaking on ``Quality Scouting and You'' at 7:30 pm at St. Bernard Catholic School. Everyone is invited and you don't have to stay for the council meeting if you're not a council representative and you only want to hear the presentation.
Besides mail, on some Internet systems, you can get files from other computers (using ``FTP'' -- File Transfer Protocol) and chat with other people live (using ``IRC'' -- International Relay Chat). The latest explosion in Internet activity uses something called the World Wide Web (WWW). On the Web, people all over the world have ``pages'' of information, sometimes with pictures and even sound. Most of these pages contain links to other pages, often in other computers and other countries.
There is now a ``home page'' for Whitby District. To reach it you have to type in a URL (Universal Resource Locator). Aren't these initials awful? Anyway, here is the location of the Whitby District page:
http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~dmwick/whitbydistrict/
The next part, csclub.uwaterloo.ca is the computer where the page is located. It's the Computer Science Club of the University of Waterloo in Canada. Actually, the computer is called ``calum,'' so it's really calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca but the shorter way works fine.
After that is /~dmwick, which is a user area (directory) for Dale M. Wick. It's really /u/dmwick, but again the short form means less typing. In Dale's file area, there's a directory for Whitby District Scouts called /whitbydistrict/.
We haven't actually given the name of the page, but since the URL ends with the name of a directory, it will look for a file called index.html in that directory. This file is the Whitby District Home Page and it has links to this year's Lighthouse newsletters. So, you can look at these newsletters using your computer from anywhere in the world.
Eventually, there should be other Whitby District information there, but for now, there is a large amount of other Scout information everywhere. Most of it is indexed at
http://inter.scoutnet.org/
Besides the Web stuff, there are ``Usenet newsgroups'' with Scouting discussions. The two most of interest to us are rec.scouting which is general world-wide Scouting and can.scout-guide which is Canadian-oriented. If you're on a computer system that gets Usenet, ask the sysop (system operator) if he can get these for you.
Another way to get into Scouting discussions using Internet is by way of mailing lists. On these, a message can be sent to a special Internet address and it gets automatically reflected to all the people in the list. There's one called canrovers which concerns Canadian Rover matters.
The first is from Ireland:
We are looking to contact any Scouts Canada, Beaver Colonies who may be interested in twining with our colony here in Ireland.
Any Beaver Scout Leaders who may be interested can contact me or alternatively you can contact one of our Beaver Leaders at the following mail address:
The second request was sent to me personally from England:
From: Christopher Wildman [100130,1454]
Subj: Scouting Contacts
My six year old son is in the Beavers, and his ``Rusty Beaver,'' Laura Cooves has asked me to find a prospective Colony on your side of the Atlantic to contact. I believe she intends to use the snail mail to maintain any such contact and we wondered if you have a local Colony of Beaver Scouts who may be interested?
The local Colony here is thriving, there is a waiting list for membership, the Cub pack has had to be split in two as the numbers of Cubs far exceeds the numbers that could use the Church Hall.
The Scouts, Cubs and Beavers meet in the Church Hall of St Phillips, in Weston Mill, a suburb of Plymouth, Devon. This is in the NW corner of the City, about a mile from the Royal Dockyard.
I do hope that you can put us in touch with a likely Colony,
Yours in Scouting
Chris Wildman and Laura Cooves.
For those of you not familiar with some of the strange computer terminology, ``snail mail'' refers to the ordinary, everyday type as opposed to ``electronic'' mail. I sincerely hope that one or more Whitby District colonies can exchange letters, tapes, pictures or anything else with these other members of our international brotherhood.
Call me (Neil) at the number on the back page if you're able to participate and I can get an electronic message of to one or both of these to get the ball rolling and let them know you'll help.
If you want, you can go to the Current List of Coming Events.
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